The Photon Reinterpreted: Pulse, Cycle, and Emission

The concept of the photon, central to quantum physics, remains ontologically ambiguous. It is defined operationally — by what it does — and not by what it is. Building on the model of light as a sequence of alternating charges (Flor, 2026n), this article proposes a decomposition of the concept into three distinct notions: the fundamental photon (a complete cycle of two pulses, one positive and one negative, separated by half a wavelength), the atomic photon (the set of cycles emitted by an atom in a given transition), and the continuous photon (the set of cycles emitted by a source over a time interval). A fourth notion, that of the half-photon (an isolated pulse), is introduced to clarify why an isolated pulse does not define a frequency. In this view, the Planck relation E=h.ν does not refer to the energy of a cycle, but to the energy of the atomic photon — which is what is experimentally measured. The energy of the atomic photon is distributed equally among the N cycles that compose it, and is proportional simultaneously to the frequency (number of sub-particles per unit time) and to the number of cycles (duration of emission). The Planck constant emerges as a constant of proportionality between the number of pulses in the atomic photon and the mass and energy of each sub-particle. With this reclassification, the model eliminates four fundamental constants of physics: h is added to c, ε0, and μ0, already eliminated in the article on the implicit medium (Flor, 2026l). The article further proposes that the photon has a diminutive rest mass, and develops here itself the qualitative reinterpretation of the experiments that indicate zero mass as measurements of the wave effect (interaction), not of the sub-particles themselves. The complete reinterpretation of E=m.c2 — as the maximum amount of energy per unit of mass — is referred to the article on mass and energy. Nothing prevents the energy of the photon from being kinetic and therefore on the order of m.c2/2. For light, the de Broglie relation λ=h/p follows immediately from p=E/c. For massive particles, the de Broglie relation is explicitly left as an open problem, to be treated in a future article. The photoelectric effect and the other interactions between light and matter are likewise referred to the article on light-matter interactions. The reinterpretation of single-photon experiments is discussed in this article.