Noetherian conservation laws for photons

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Abstract

We review the formulation of a Lorentz-covariant bispinorial wave function and wave equation for a single photon on a flat background. We show the existence of a 10-dimensional set of conservation laws for this equation, and prove that 8 of these can be used to obtain global, gauge-invariant, ADM-like quantities that together define a covariantly constant self-dual bispinor.

Keywords

photon wave function / relativistic quantum mechanics / Dirac’s equation / gauge-invariant conservation laws

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