Frequency-independent effective rest mass of photons in the 2TDLM model

Abstract

A physically interesting {\it effective rest mass} of photons in electromagnetic media, which is independent of wave frequency $\omega$, is defined in the present paper. It is verified that this frequency-independent effective rest mass of photons can be easily read off from the optical refractive index squared $n^2(\omega )$ of commonly-seen electromagnetic media. As an illustrative example, we extract the frequency-independent effective rest mass of photons from $n^2(\omega )$ in the {\it two time derivative Lorentz material} (2TDLM) model. The connection between effective rest mass and electromagnetic parameters of electric permittivity ($\epsilon$) and magnetic permeability ($\mu$) in left-handed media is also briefly discussed.

8 pages, no figures, Latex

References in corpus (2)

• Geometric Phase and Helicity Inversion of Photons Propagating inside a Noncoplanarly Curved Optical Fiber
• Anti-shielding Effect and Negative Temperature in Instantaneously Reversed Electric Fields and Left-Handed Media

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Axiomatic geometrical optics, Abraham-Minkowski controversy, and photon properties derived classically