From Faraday and Maxwell to Quantum Physics. The later story of the Electromagnetic Vector Potential

Abstract

With the advent of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg in 1925 exactly a century ago, the quantization of the electromagnetic field became an important goal for our founding fathers, whom we are here to celebrate. It was realized very soon that a consistent picture of quantum electrodynamics (QED) requires the quantization of not just the electromagnetic field ${\bf A}({\bf r},t)$, but the electron field ${\bf ψ}({\bf r},t)$ as well. The electron field is now a Dirac spinor field and it becomes a major partner for the vector potential. Together these two fields form a duet which yearns for a unification which is not often emphasized in text books, but no one knows how to do this yet. The underlying structure appears to be a super-symmetric one where bosons and fermions live comfortably as a single field that could by some yet unknown process produce QED. This area is still at the forefront of current research with names like Super-symmetric Quantum Electrodynamics (SQED), strings and others. Ironically for a variety of reasons, the number of fields in SQED has to be increased and not decreased, defying the objective of an economical unification. Furthermore it is now known that Maxwell's theory is incomplete and that there are situations due to boundaries or topology that demand the vector potential must itself be gauge invariant. (This paper is dedicated to the celebration of 100 years of quantum mechanics, on the anniversary of Heisenberg's founding paper on the subject in July 1925, delivered by Miguel Ortuño at the IQSA 2025 Conference at Tropea in Calabria, Italy from 30 June to 4th July 2025. The proceedings will be published as a celebratory volume by World Scientific Publications, Singapore in 2026).