# Tag Info

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The particle/wave duality is an old concept that has never done anything good for anyone (not even Einstein and de Broglie). It's time to let go of it, even among the "groupies". We know "how" quantum mechanics works and the answer is "neither". What you are basically asking is for an experiment that can decide between two outright wrong models. Obviously, ...

0

Tadeas Bilkas answer let me think about the sence of all and all time citing the quantum mechanics. I write his answer in terms of common mechanics and get the same result: You have an emitter of balls which radiates just one single ball but in a spherical area. You place a lot of baskets some meters apart (with same distance) from the emitter. Mathematics ...

2

In case you "run out of photons", you must switch to probabilistic description of quantum mechanics. Let's consider an extreme case: You have an emitter of spherical waves which radiates just one single photon. You place a lot of detectors some meters apart (with same distance) from the emitter. QM says that the photon propagates as a probabilistic wave to ...

2

The classical electromagnetic field given mathematically by Maxwell's equations can be proven to emerge from a confluence of individual photons, which photons are described by the Quantum Mechanical form of Maxwell's equations. Thus the classical wave is made up by zillions of photons with energy $h\nu$, where $\nu$ is the frequency of the classical wave. ...

1

"Running out" of photons simply means that your wavefront is absorbed or scattered in a different direction or something like that. Either way, the original wave is "consumed", so you loose intensity or photons, depending on which picture you like better. For the case of a single photon source: One photon can only interact with one electron. However, there ...

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As John Rennie, says, what-does-a-de-broglie-wave-look-like has helpful answers which you should read first, but I don't think they are complete. Do they behave like transverse waves? No - the wave function for a single particle with no spin from the Schrodinger equation is just a scalar so there is no direction connected with it. For example: can ...

3

Let's look theoretically to your question. Let's introduce linearized GR and then let's derive the wave equations. It is exactly the second Bianchi equation for the Weyl tensor. We want to associate some particle to the gravity wave (only for linearized gravity limit). For associating we must do at least two things: 1) Show that equation for hypothetical ...

1

If there was a quantum theory of gravity (which there isn't) then it would include a graviton as the elementary particle associated with gravity, in the same way that the photon is associated with the electromagnetic field (as CuriousMind says). An electromagnetic wave in vacuum is transverse - both the electric and magnetic fields are vectors that are at ...

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Hadrons contain only virtual gluons, which do not obey the ordinary relationships between energy and wavelength. High energy collisions are required to create real gluons - which do.

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They do, just as all quantum objects do. They have momenta, and since they are massless, their frequency/wavelength/energy/momentum relations are the same as for photons. But since you will never detect a free gluon, as they are color-charged and thus confined, this is not a sensible thing to say. Quantum objects are not waves (just as they are not ...

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Yes gluons exhibit particle duality. The gluon has no mass, and therefore travels at the speed of light when created and annihilated in their exchange within the nucleons.

0

Listen from the Feynman: I want to emphasize that light comes in this form-particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave-like particles. You might say ...

2

The classic experiment to demonstrate this is the double-slit experiment. Take an opaque material, and cut in it two small slits. Shine on these slits some coherent light, such as that from a laser. On the side of the slits opposite the light source, place a light detector. Firstly, you will observe diffraction and interference: This demonstrates that ...

6

When it's traveling through space, it's a wave. When it hits a wall, or a photo-sensitive chemical strip or something similar, it's a particle. No, this is wrong. It's not sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave. It's always a particle and always a wave. Here is an example of an experiment whose results can't be explained by a pure wave model or a ...

1

I would generally support Ayesha's answer, in that it explains that decoherence is instigated by the microscopic interacting with the macroscopic. As with many things in Quantum Physics, this is evidently true at the extremes (e.g. putting a detector in the path of a photon in the dual slit experiment), but it is not clear when something is considered ...

0

To also give a more direct reply to your photon in a slit example, in simple words: Observing the photon passing through the slit is not just a conceptual act, it means placing a photon detector at the slit and as the photon passes through, its state is measured and since a measurement in quantum mechanics comes at the cost of perturbing the original state ...

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Suppose we represent the wavefunction of the photon as $\psi_p$ and the wavefunction of the observer as $\psi_o$. As long as the photon and observer do not interact in any way we can write the total wavefunction as a product: $$\Psi = \psi_p\psi_o \tag{1}$$ The trouble is that you can't make any measurement of the photon without interacting with it, and ...

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I'll illustrate by referring to the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment. The experiment consists of a cat in a box, to which is attached a small amount of a radioactive substance. In the course of an hour, the substance may or may not emit a particle. If it does, then a Geiger counter triggers a can of cyanide, killing the cat. After an hour, the cat's wave ...

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