Interference in the far-field radiation pattern emitted from a classical current distribution implies near-field work between different spatial portions of the distribution. We examine this relationship and the essential role of system geometry for the case of two oscillating dipoles and for a Gaussian current distribution. This analysis offers a compelling argument as to why the radiation from a large single-electron quantum wave packet should not exhibit the same destructive interference as that associated with a comparable classical charge density. Our discussion draws attention to the ad hoc heuristics motivating the original derivation of a quantum electron's radiation profile.
REFERENCES
It is implied that quantities on the right-hand-side of Eq. (31) are evaluated at the retarded time. Interestingly, depends on an incident photon momentum as well as on a scattered photon momentum , where , even though all fields are intrinsically classical. Gordon changes to a different set of momentum variables in order to simplify the integrals, which introduces explicit Doppler factors.24
