A recent discovery suggests that photons can have half-integer spins. This seems to contradict the well understood notion that photons are vector (1-form) fields
What does this mean for the fundamental picture of electromagnetic propagation?
Answer
It probably does not mean anything. That paper concerns the quantization of electromagnetic waves in less than three spatial dimensions. In fact, there are a number of decades-old results showing that it is often possible to evade the spin-statistics relationship in lower-dimensional systems. While these kinds of results (including this new one) may be very interesting theoretically and may have applications to the quantization of excitations in two-dimensional condensed matter systems (not pure photons, but coupled excitations involving the charge density of the material and the electromagentic field), it is not going to change anything we know about how physical photons propagate in three-dimensional space.
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