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Photons are the elementary quantum excitations of the electromagnetic field.Quantization is usually constructed on the basis of an expansion in eigenmodes,in the form of plane waves. Since they form a basis, other electromagneticconfigurations can be constructed by linear combinations. In this presentationwe discuss a formulation constructed in the general formalism of bosonic Fockspace, in which the quantum excitation can be constructed directly on localizedpulses of arbitrary shape. Although the two formulations are essentiallyequivalent, the direct formulation in terms of pulses has some conceptual andpractical advantages, which we illustrate with some examples. The first one isthe passage of a single photon pulse through a beam splitter. The analysis ofthis formulation in terms of pulses in Fock space shows that there is no needto introduce "vacuum fluctuations entering through the unused port", as isoften done in the literature. Another example is the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect. Itis described as a time dependent process in the Schr\"odinger representation inFock space. The analysis shows explicitly how the two essential ingredients ofthe Hong-Ou-Mandel effect are the same shape of the pulses and the bosonicnature of photons. This formulation shows that all the phenomena involvinglinear quantum optical devices can be described and calculated on the basis ofthe time dependent solution of the corresponding classical Maxwell's equationsfor pulses, from which the quantum dynamics in Fock space can be immediatelyconstructed.

Space-time propagation of photon pulses in dielectric media,illustrations with beam splitters