Rigorous theory of photon localizability

Abstract

The ideas of localizability of elementary particles introduced by Newton and Wigner (1949) are expressed in the language of imprimitivities as formulated by Mackey and Wightman. This naturally brings in the induced representations of the Euclidean and Poincare groups. The authors specialize the discussion to the case of the photon and show in detail that an imprimitivity for the Euclidean group is not consistent with representations of the Poincare group relevant to the photon.