ABSTRACT
A paradigm of optical (photon) tunneling appears in relation to the physics of frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR); see e.g., [123, 118, 50, 224, 51]. In the FTIR process evanescent fields play an indispensable role, and the fact that the source domains of transverse and longitudinal photons generated by a current density sheet (located at z = 0) extend outside the sheet, with a current density profile given by exp(−q‖|z|), indicates that the physics in the rim zone is crucial for an understanding of the photon tunneling process. We shall reach the FTIR tunneling process starting from a broader framework. Thus, it turns out that optical near-field interaction, spatial photon localization, and photon tunneling have the same roots. The considerations to follow also lead to connections to the photon measurement problem which we shall address in Part VIII. In a broader context the problem brings us in contact with the so-called measurement theory in quantum physics, which in itself raises deep questions about the physical/philosophical structure of human observations [168, 157, 247].
