Off-Shell Quantum Fields to Connect Dressed Photons with Cosmology

The anomalous nanoscale electromagnetic field arising from light-matter interactions in a nanometric space is called a dressed photon. While the generic technology realized by utilizing dressed photons has demolished the conventional wisdom of optics, for example, the unexpectedly high-power light emission from indirect-transition type semiconductors, dressed photons are still considered to be too elusive to justify because conventional optical theory has never explained the mechanism causing them. The situation seems to be quite similar to that of the dark energy/matter issue in cosmology. Regarding these riddles in different disciplines, we find a common important clue for their resolution in the form of the relevance of space-like momentum support, without which quantum fields cannot interact with each other according to a mathematical result of axiomatic quantum field theory. Here, we show that a dressed photon, as well as dark energy, can be explained in terms of newly identified space-like momenta of the electromagnetic field and dark matter can be explained as the off-shell energy of the Weyl tensor field.