Abstract
It is shown that the universal expression describing the number of photons in terms of the electromagnetic field vectors, discovered long time ago by Zeldovich, makes its appearance in the quantum description of the ground state of the electromagnetic field. It is also argued that this rather unorthodox way of counting the photons may have consequences for astrophysics and cosmology.
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg
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Białynicki-Birula, I. (2004). The Structure of the Vacuum and the Photon Number. In: Elze, HT. (eds) Decoherence and Entropy in Complex Systems. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 633. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40968-7_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40968-7_20
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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Online ISBN: 978-3-540-40968-7
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