Abstract
I briefly review the seminal 1927 paper of Dirac which emphasized the need for the quantization of the electromagnetic field and then showed how to carry it out. After mentioning few historical developments, I then point out some of the outstanding successes of quantum electrodynamics —the kind of agreement which exists between theory and experiment is unprecedented in the history of science.
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P A M Dirac,Proc. of Royal Soc. (London), Vol. A 114, 243, 710, 1927.
P Jordan and E Wigner,Z. Phys., Vol. 47, 631, 1928.
W Heisenberg and W Pauli,Z. Phys., Vol. 56, 1, 1929.
E Fermi,Rev. Mod. Phys., Vol. 4, 131, 1931.
For comparison of QED with experiments, see for example, T Kinoshita (Editor),Quantum Electrodynamics, World Scientific, 1990.
W Heitler,The quantum Theory of Radiation, Dover, 1953.
P R Berman,Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics, Academic, 1994.
D F Walls and G J Milburn,Quantum Optics, Springer, 1994.
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Avinash Khare is with the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar. His main interests are in the areas of field theory, nonlinear physics, anyons and supersymmetric quantum mechanics.
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Khare, A. Quantization of the radiation field. Reson 8, 10–16 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02866755
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02866755