A recent discovery suggests that photons can have half-integer spins. This seems to contradict the well understood notion that photons are vector (1-form) fields
What does this mean for the fundamental picture of electromagnetic propagation?
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1Related: http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/256386/2451 – Qmechanic May 17 '16 at 21:20
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1The discovery does not suggest that photons can have half-integer spin, see my answer to the related question (or just actually read the paper). It shows that there is a generalized total angular momentum that is half-integer values, but the generalized total angular momentum is not spin. This question makes no sense because its premise is false. – ACuriousMind May 18 '16 at 14:59
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It probably does not mean anything. That paper concerns the quantization of electromagnetic waves in less than three spatial dimensions. In fact, there are a number of decades-old results showing that it is often possible to evade the spin-statistics relationship in lower-dimensional systems. While these kinds of results (including this new one) may be very interesting theoretically and may have applications to the quantization of excitations in two-dimensional condensed matter systems (not pure photons, but coupled excitations involving the charge density of the material and the electromagentic field), it is not going to change anything we know about how physical photons propagate in three-dimensional space.
