Is a Single Photon Always Circularly Polarized? A Proposed Experiment using a Superconducting Microcalorimeter Photon Detector

Abstract

A single photon is well known to have spin S = hbar, which would correspond to circular polarization, and all quantum transitions with photon absorption or emission correspond to DeltaS = +/-hbar. However, it is also widely believed that a single photon may be linearly polarized, which would correspond to a state with S = 0. Indeed, linearly polarized single photons are central to most quantum entanglement experiments. On the contrary, it has recently been suggested (based on a realistic spin-quantized wave picture of quantum states) that a linearly polarized photon state must be a superposition of a pair of circularly polarized photons, each with S = +/-hbar. This question cannot be resolved using a conventional photon detector, which generally cannot distinguish one photon from two simultaneous photons. However, it can be addressed using a superconducting microcalorimeter detector with sub-eV energy resolution and high quantum efficiency (QE). A careful experiment demonstrating this photon pairing could place in question some of the paradoxical central foundations of modern quantum theory, including quantum entanglement and nonlocality.