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I’m trying to get a grip on photon-electron physics (for purely applied engineering purposes). I know this belongs to QED, but I’m having a hard time finding a textbook.

Most books I found are on two extremes of a spectrum:

  • zero rigor: popular science books (e.g. Feynman's QED)

  • utterly theoretical: books which cover QED in a somewhat cursory way within the larger framework of QFT. QFT is too generic/theoretical for my purposes, and being a superset of QED adds too much unnecessary formalism for my purposes.

Maybe I'll pickup QFT later on, but I'm only trying to understand photons-electrons for now.

Qmechanic
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Z. Uryum
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    You could always grab a QFT book and just read the rules for computing QED processes. But your question is kind of like asking "how can I learn to solve problems with springs without learning Newton's laws?". – Javier Aug 14 '16 at 17:43
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    The interaction of light with electrons for engineering purposes is essentially classical with exception of a few topics that can be understood with ordinary quantum mechanics. Using QED for an "application" would be complete overkill. Unless your engineering involves an accelerator of some sort, you won't have to concern yourself with it, at all. If your application does involve an accelerator, then it's highly likely that you have access to several theorists who can do all the calculations for you, in which case you don't have to concern yourself with any of this, either. – CuriousOne Aug 14 '16 at 18:51
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    Try looking into cavity QED. This is a much simpler variant of QED already used for engineering applications, and in the simplest variant (where you consider only one EM field mode), it requires nothing more than QM. – knzhou Aug 14 '16 at 19:28
  • @CuriousOne .. thank you for the clarification, much appreciated. The application is generally high-power microwave tubes for nanomaterials processing. This sometimes involves high electron velocities and requires precise interactions with matter, so a relativistic formulation could help. I'm not sure these can be accurately modeled classically. What do you think? Thank you. – Z. Uryum Aug 14 '16 at 19:34
  • I don't see how that would require QED. Below 1MeV and with the exception of precision spectroscopy there should be no QED corrections that can be discerned from other physical effects. If you are looking at a microwave plasma reactor, the entire difficulty with those would be plasma physics, rather than high energy physics. – CuriousOne Aug 14 '16 at 19:38
  • @knzhou .. interesting! thank you for the hint. Do you know any references which treat this without resorting to QFT? Thank you. – Z. Uryum Aug 14 '16 at 20:05
  • @CuriousOne .. I see what you're trying to say. I guess the reason I'm looking into QED is that it ties photons and electrons neatly and compactly (compared to classical modeling), and its treatment of the subject removes the need for wave-particle duality, which (imho) is much more intuitive, which makes it easier to brainstorm and tweak design decisions. – Z. Uryum Aug 14 '16 at 20:15
  • Neatly? Not sure about that. :-) One never needs wave particle duality, ever. Not in non-relativistic QM, not in QFT, not in nuclear physics, not in plasma physics. In any case, I would be surprised if you got anything there that exceeds a few keV in energy. Are you using radiation shielding at work? If you aren't, then you are either exposing yourself to a health hazard or you don't need QED... unless you can measure thing with 10 digits precision. :-) – CuriousOne Aug 14 '16 at 20:22
  • How can we answer your question? We don't know your starting point or your endpoint, your object. The obvious answer is to pick up where your education diverged from a mainstream physics education and take it from there - eg 1st year University Physics books in Quantum Mechanics or Particle Physics. – sammy gerbil Aug 14 '16 at 23:33
  • See the Physics SE book recommendations. – sammy gerbil Aug 15 '16 at 00:06

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