Timeline for Modified double-slit experiment - two electron sources instead of two slits
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
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| May 16, 2015 at 4:03 | comment | added | CuriousOne | I believe it without the math now. My mistake was to forget about the difference between bosons and fermions. My argument does, indeed, only work for bosons. Great answer! Thanks! | |
| May 15, 2015 at 20:42 | comment | added | Sebastian Riese | @CuriousOne I worked out the math in the last edit. The two electrons will not interfere. (Unless I made a mistake). | |
| May 15, 2015 at 20:41 | history | edited | Sebastian Riese | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
add a complete calculation for the two electron case
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| May 14, 2015 at 23:52 | vote | accept | user6760 | ||
| May 14, 2015 at 23:20 | comment | added | CuriousOne | Hmmm... but why would that destroy interference? It may change the pattern? If I think about it as a potential well problem, then more than two electrons would occupy quantum states with different energies... OK, now I see what you mean. The single-electron wave functions will have different energies. OK. You are right. One has to do this with bosons like helium atoms to get the result that I am expecting. Do you know anybody who has not one but two atom fountains sitting around? :-) | |
| May 14, 2015 at 22:56 | comment | added | Sebastian Riese | Not only that, but we will have an effect of the anti-symmetrization of total wave function (as when scattering identical fermions). | |
| May 14, 2015 at 22:46 | comment | added | CuriousOne | Oh, now I see what you mean... it might take an additional magnetic field to select for spin state? | |
| May 14, 2015 at 21:22 | comment | added | Sebastian Riese | I still can't wrap my head around the two electron case. Intuitively, I think it will make a difference from the photon case, that they are fermions and we cannot construct a coherent state out of them. I'll try to do the math for the two electron case and report. | |
| May 14, 2015 at 21:16 | comment | added | Sebastian Riese | Well something like this I meant by clever electron guns ;) | |
| May 14, 2015 at 20:58 | comment | added | CuriousOne | It just occurred to me that there may be a way to actually do this experiment. If the electron sources consist of two laser traps which cool electrons to a very low temperature before they release them adiabatically, then one can make single electron sources that will get two electron wave-functions to overlap in space in time and with long enough coherence length to actually observe the interference. That would be a very cool (literally!) quantum bowling experiment! | |
| May 14, 2015 at 20:50 | comment | added | CuriousOne | It's not quite that simple. Electron guns are only incoherent because their energy dispersion is much wider than that of coherent photon sources. If you do the experiment with two lasers that have very narrow spectra, you will see (classical and quantum) interference overlaid by a beat. Indeed, the major problem in that experiment would be to actually keep the two lasers from mode-locking trough reflected photons! The exact same would be true for electron guns, if we could make their energy dispersion small enough. Technologically we can't, but that doesn't mean there is no interference. | |
| May 14, 2015 at 20:03 | history | answered | Sebastian Riese | CC BY-SA 3.0 |