Photon-Notoph Equations

Abstract

In the sixties Ogievetskii and Polubarinov proposed the concept of a notoph, whose helicity properties are complementary to those of a photon. We analyze the theory of antisymmetric tensor fields in the view of the normalization problem. The obtained result is that it is possible to describe both photon and notoph degrees of freedom on the basis of the modified Bargmann-Wigner formalism for the symmetric second-rank spinor. Physical consequences are discussed.