Theory of the Complex Refractive Index

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Abstract
A quantum-mechanical formalism is developed for representing the complex refractive index of a gas, including both dispersive and absorptive parts. In analogy with some previous work by the author, it is shown that the phenomenological Maxwell equations are obeyed as equations between certain matrix elements of operators representing the field quantities. The method makes use of a canonical transformation due to Arnous and Bleuler, and also of the "damping operators" previously introduced by the author. It is shown that the calculation of the complex refractive index reduces to the calculation of a single diagonal matrix element of a damping operator. The actual evaluation of this matrix element is taken up in the following paper.

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