Now, I don't really mean to say that Maxwell's equations are wrong. I know Maxwell's equations are very accurate when it comes to predicting physical phenomena, but going through high school and now in college, Maxwell's equations are seen as the equations of electricity and magnetism. Now, it's common knowledge among students that, while Newton's laws are generally accurate when applied to everyday experiences, they are also replaced at high velocities by special relativity (and general relativity for very large gravitational fields).
But this is less so the case with Maxwell's equations. I have read that Maxwell's equations are replaced with quantum electrodynamics (which to me has all the effect of mere buzzwords, since I don't know what quantum electrodynamics is) as a more accurate way of describing electromagnetic waves, but what are the limitations of Maxwell's equations?
Or let me phrase this differently. I'm currently an electrical engineering major. I know NASA scientists and engineers can still get away with using Newtonian physics for their calculations, because it's that accurate. I also know, however, that relativity does have to come into play with GPS. So, in what situation as an electrical engineer would Maxwell's equations ever fail me? When (assuming I'm working on such a sufficiently advanced project) would I have to resort to more accurate ways to describe electromagnetic waves?
Answer
Maxwellian electrodynamics fails when quantum mechanical phenomena are involved, in the same way that Newtonian mechanics needs to be replaced in that regime by quantum mechanics. Maxwell's equations don't really "fail", as there is still an equivalent version in QM, it's just the mechanics itself that changes.
Let me elaborate on that one for a bit. In Newtonian mechanics, you had a time-dependent position and momentum, $x(t)$ and $p(t)$ for your particle. In quantum mechanics, the dynamical state is transferred to the quantum state $\psi$, whose closest classical analogue is a probability density in phase space in Liouvillian mechanics. There are two different "pictures" in quantum mechanics, which are exactly equivalent.
In the Schrödinger picture, the dynamical evolution is encoded in the quantum state $\psi$, which evolves in time according to the Schrödinger equation. The position and momentum are replaced by static operators $\hat x$ and $\hat p$ which act on $\psi$; this action can be used to find the expected value, and other statistics, of any measurement of position or momentum.
In the Heisenberg picture, the quantum state is fixed, and it is the operators of all the dynamical variables, including position and momentum, that evolve in time, via the Heisenberg equation.
In the simplest version of quantum electrodynamics, and in particular when no relativistic phenomena are involved, Maxwell's equations continue to hold: they are exactly the Heisenberg equations on the electric and magnetic fields, which are now operators on the system's state $\psi$. Thus, you're formally still "using" the Maxwell equations, but this is rather misleading as the mechanics around it is completely different. (Also, you tend to work on the Schrödinger picture, but that's beside the point.)
This regime is used to describe experiments that require the field itself to be quantized, such as Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometry or experiments where the field is measurably entangled with matter. There is also a large gray area of experiments which are usefully described with this formalism but do not actually require a quantized EM field, such as the examples mentioned by Anna. (Thus, for example, black-body radiation can be explained equally well with discrete energy levels on the emitters rather than the radiation.)
This regime was, until recently, pretty much confined to optical physics, so it wasn't really something an electrical engineer would need to worry about. That has begun to change with the introduction of circuit QED, which is the study of superconducting circuits which exhibit quantum behaviour. This is an exciting new research field and it's one of our best bets for building a quantum computer (or, depending on who you ask, the model used by the one quantum computer that's already built. ish.), so it's something to look at if you're looking at career options ;).
The really crazy stuff comes in when you push electrodynamics into regimes which are both quantum and relativistic (where "relativistic" means that the frequency $\nu$ of the EM radiation is bigger than $c^2/h$ times the mass of all relevant material particles). Here quantum mechanics also changes, and becomes what's known as quantum field theory, and this introduces a number of different phenomena. In particular, the number of particles may change over time, so you can put a photon in a box and come back to find an electron and a positron (which wouldn't happen in classical EM).
Again, here the problem is not EM itself, but rather the mechanics around it. QFT is built around a concept called the action, which completely determines the dynamics. You can also build classical mechanics around the action, and the action for quantum electrodynamics is formally identical to that of classical electrodynamics.
This regime includes pair creation and annihilation phenomena, and also things like photon-photon scattering, which do seem at odds with classical EM. For example, you can produce two gamma-ray beams and make them intersect, and they will scatter off each other slightly. This is inconsistent with the superposition principle of classical EM, as it breaks linearity, so you could say that the Maxwell equations have failed - but, as I pointed out, it's a bit more subtle than that.
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