SECOND QUANTIZATION

17

be rather arbitrary. With the choice of pre-factors in those relations we obtain the expression for the Hamiltonian Equation (1.57). Had we made a different choice then additional factors would have appeared in Equation (1.57) in disagreement with experiment, for example, black-body radiation.

1.2.3 Momentum
The momentum of the electromagnetic eld in a vacuum is given by the classical expression 1 Pem = (1.58) d3 x E B 4 The complex conjugate of B appears so that P is parallel to k. We replace the complex conjugate by the Hermitian conjugate but in the present case B is Hermitian so the does not matter. We calculate the E B using Equation (1.44) and Equation (1.45) E B = 4 V k a (k)eikx (k) a (k)eikx (k) 2

k,

1 ik x a (k )eik x k k (k ) (k ) a (k )e 2k k , (1.59) When working out this expression we get a cross product of a vector and a cross product of two other vectors. They can be evaluated as
(k) k (k ) = [ (k) (k )] k (k) k

= [ (k) (k )] k

(1.60)

The rst step in the above equation expands the triple product as in a (b c) = c (a b). In the second step we used that k = k and thus (k) k = (k) = 0 according to Equation (1.19). The other three cross products of a vector and a cross product can be evaluated in a manner similar to Equation (1.60). When working out Equation (1.60) we notice some similarity between this calculation and the one done earlier for |E|2 and |B|2 , especially in the way the products of the exponentials are structured. We get four terms, each summed over k, , k , . There are two types of exponentials among the four terms: those with the difference and those with the sum of k and k in the exponent. We reorder Equation (1.59)