Is the extent of the electromagnetic field of a photon limited to the event horizon of ct, where c=speed of light and t=time since photon generation? Or does some component of the field fill all space instantaneously while the wave front of the virtual particle is projecting at c? If not, why not since the field can collapse instantaneously upon photon detection?
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Is the extent of the electromagnetic field of a photon
The photon is an elementary particle in the standard model of particle physics. It does not have an electromagnetic field. It only has spin +/-1 in its direction of motion, momentum and energy E=h*nu where h is Plancks constant and nu is the frequency of the classical electromagnetic waves that might be built up by a large ensemble of photons of this energy.
The connection with the classical field comes through the photon wavefunction
The only measurable quantity is the complex conjugate squared of the wave function which gives the probability distribution for finding the given photon . Thus it makes no sense to speak of the field of a single photon or its extent.
The photon field you may have heard about is the quantum field theoretical one, all of space has a ground state of this photon wave function on which creation and annihilation operators create or destroy a photon. One has to study quantum field theory
anna v
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$E=h\nu$to write $E=h\nu$. – AccidentalFourierTransform Aug 21 '17 at 14:39