Timeline for Experimental suggestions for size and shape of single optical photon (wavepacket)?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 3, 2021 at 5:13 | comment | added | Manu de Hanoi | the relationship that correlates color with size of aperture is well explained by classical wave mechanics. I know it's hard not to assign energy to a location, but it'd even harder to give it a location. When you lift an object up from the ground it gains potential energy, but that energy is nowhere to be found. | |
| May 2, 2021 at 21:36 | comment | added | PhysicsDave | @ManudeHanoi it seems to me that we can use different colours or energies of photons and they correlate very well to the size of apertures that can transmit the light. It's hard to imagine a photon from a star to earth not having some kind of local energy occupying a volume of space. | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 10:47 | comment | added | Manu de Hanoi | The paper is too complicated for me, I just tried to comment on your question. I do have my own issues with the photon concept that I explained above. What I get from the paper is that they try to assign a size to a photon, then get into trouble explaining double slit interference so they bring in "evanescent waves" and then claim that the photon field isnt sharply cut (and therefore the size isnt either). For me it's just simpler to consider that light isnt quantized before it's absorbed, it's just a classic EM wave, so I dont need to worry about photons size. | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 9:21 | comment | added | Jarek Duda | Sure, we cannot directly measure the details, but it also concerns e.g. processes in the center of stars - such difficulty should not stop us: from extrapolating knowledge to self consistent models including given situation, like the cited two articles trying to predict something about EM field configuration of photon. If you don't know, what do you think about them and experimental arguments they use? | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 8:19 | comment | added | Manu de Hanoi | in other words, electric fields do work on charged particles, but without knowing the location of the charged particle you can't say the energy is here or there. And even if you knew where the charged particle is, where would be that energy "located"? In the field, or on the particle, or between the particles that originated the light and the particle that light acts upon ??? Energy involves spacial positions (ex gravity potential energy) but there is no specific location for the enrgy itself | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 8:08 | comment | added | Manu de Hanoi | You can only detect energy when it does work. And the location of the work done is hard to pinpoint. We can however give a geometry to the electric field for light and that geometry is given by the maxwell equations as usual. And for light it's just an EM field shaped like a sine wave (or a combination of sines) | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 8:00 | comment | added | Jarek Duda | Isn't photon EM field configuration? If so, there should be rho ~ |E|^2 + |B|^2 energy density ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… ) - some distribution of its energy. What can we tell about shape/size of this energy distribution? | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 7:50 | history | answered | Manu de Hanoi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |