Localization of Massless Spinning Particles and the Berry Phase

Abstract

The components of the position operator, at a fixed time, for a massless and spinning particle with given helicity $\lambda$ described in terms of bosonic degrees of freedom have an anomalous commutator proportional to $\lambda$. The position operator generates translations in momentum space. We show that a ray-representation for these translations emerges due to the non-commuting components of the position operators and relate this to the Berry-phase for photons. The Tomita-Chiao experiment then gives support for this relativistic and quantum mechanical description of photons in terms of non-commuting position operators.