Timeline for How can a single photon be detected?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
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| Jul 19, 2020 at 9:25 | comment | added | hbadger19042 | Where does the uncertainty of momentum come from? If a photon is emitted from an atom by decaying of electron state, the difference between energy levels is well-defined. And the emitted photon should have the energy corresponding to the quantum jump to satisfy the conservation of energy. | |
| Jul 17, 2020 at 6:57 | comment | added | ohneVal | Yes, but then your issue has more to do with the measuring problem, under the "standard" view of wave-function collapse, it makes sense that this superposition just ends up taking one of the eigenstates. | |
| Jul 17, 2020 at 3:16 | comment | added | hbadger19042 | I am confused by your statement. What you say is that the photon produced is the superposition of photons with similar but not equal momentums for the uncertainty of the momentum. So if we represent the photon state in Fock space, the state would be the multiple photon state. But what they claim is that they detect the single photon. | |
| Jul 16, 2020 at 18:14 | comment | added | ohneVal | Yes that is true, it is a property of nature, so even with idealized measurement devices the relation should hold, in practice the measurement devices are nowhere close to such an idealization however | |
| Jul 16, 2020 at 16:55 | comment | added | WillO | But even if you could read the screen with arbitrarily great precision, the uncertainty principle would still apply. | |
| Jul 16, 2020 at 15:22 | history | answered | ohneVal | CC BY-SA 4.0 |