Abstract

The profound distinctions between photon and Fermion optics appear in the second-order coherence properties of the particle field.¹ Particularly significant are blackbody radiation² and thermal electron fields; the correlation functions are uniquely specified by temperature θ and chemical potential u. Differences in the second-order coherence arise principally from considerations of (a) particle conservation (photons are not conserved; electron conservation is rigorous and tantamount to charge conservation); (b) tensorial character of the fields (electromagnetic fields are vector-valued; electron fields are spinor-valued); (c) quantum statistics (photons and electrons are subject to Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics, respectively).

© 1987 Optical Society of America