Timeline for How to tell theoretically whether an electron behaves as wave or particle
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
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| Sep 30, 2013 at 21:33 | comment | added | codeAndStuff | Hmm, no this is only one order of magnitude larger. Besides that point, this goes back to what @Michael Brown said, which was that you never have strictly one or the other. You are forced by nature to realize that there are wavelike properties and particle like properties to everything. As far as I'm aware, one should expect the diffraction from the double slit to occur regardless of temperature. My statement was more about in what regime can you treat particles as classical and get somewhat reasonable results from calculations of expected physical observables such as energy, etc... | |
| Sep 30, 2013 at 20:29 | comment | added | Gotaquestion | Thanks for the information @MaxGraves , I did some calculation for de Broglie wavelength of electrons with temperature of 300 K which gave 6 nm approximately. The latest double slit experiment was done at University of Nebraska-Lincoln where they used a slit width of 62 nm. Don't you think that having a slit width 10 times larger than electron wavelength should make the electron behave classically? | |
| Sep 30, 2013 at 19:32 | vote | accept | Gotaquestion | ||
| Sep 30, 2013 at 17:43 | comment | added | codeAndStuff | Michael Brown: I absolutely agree with you about the fact that wave/particle duality never takes a vacation and that when we work in the classical approximation, it is not because our electrons have somehow become particles rather than waves. My answer was really to illuminate the fact that one needs to determine which character is more dominant in order to effectively model systems. Also, can you please accept my answer so that I get >50 rep points, I am new and would like to be able to leave comments!! | |
| Sep 30, 2013 at 17:05 | history | edited | codeAndStuff | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 443 characters in body
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| Sep 30, 2013 at 16:58 | history | answered | codeAndStuff | CC BY-SA 3.0 |