Light (or any radiation as a matter of fact) is an electromagnetic wave so why doesn't it have a electric charge associated with it? As far as I know only static or flowing electric chargers can produce electric fields and if it does have a charge why doesn't light (i.e. a photon) respond to an electric or magnetic field?
Asked
Active
Viewed 2,082 times
1 Answers
1
You can think of light as the carrier of the electromagnetic interaction. The particles interact with light, not directly with each other. It is an experimental fact that light does not interact with itself.
Note that this is not the case with quantum chromodynamics (the theory of nuclear matter). This theory is built along the same lines as quantum electrodynamics (QED) but the gauge field is non abelian this time. The field is represented by matrices (instead of being a vector for QED) which do not commute with each other. This makes it necessary to consider field-field interactions. We get objects such as glueballs: bound states of field excitations only.
Steven Mathey
- 4,425