Locally-acting mirror Hamiltonians

Abstract: Photons, i.e. the basic energy quanta of monochromatic waves, are highly non-localised and occupy all available space in one dimension. This non-local property can complicate the modelling of the quantised electromagnetic field in the presence of optical elements that are local objects. Therefore, in this paper, we take an alternative approach and quantise the electromagnetic field in position space. Taking into account the negative- {\em and} the positive-frequency solutions of Maxwell's equations, we construct annihilation operators for highly-localised field excitations with bosonic commutator relations. These provide natural building blocks of wave packets of light and enable us to construct locally-acting interaction Hamiltonians for two-sided semi-transparent mirrors.