Questions tagged [wave-particle-duality]
Use this tag for questions relating to the "wave-nature of particles" or the "particle-nature of waves" as they are often discussed in quantum mechanics, where a single object has properties of both classical particles and classical waves.
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Is the wave-particle duality a real duality?
I often hear about the wave-particle duality, and how particles exhibit properties of both particles and waves. However, I wonder, is this actually a duality? At the most fundamental level, we 'know' ...
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Is it wrong to say that an electron can be a wave?
In QM it is sometimes said that electrons are not waves but they behave like waves or that waves are a property of electrons. Perhaps it is better to speak of a wave function representing a particular ...
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$\lambda=\frac{2h}{p}$ instead of $\lambda=\frac{h}{p}$?
I am studying quantum physics and there is something I don't understand:
I know that for any particle $E=hf$ (Einstein relation) and
$v=\lambda f$ ($v$ is the speed of the particle).
I also know ...
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Why one should follow Snell's law for shortest time?
whenever two media and two velocities are involved, one must follow Snell's law if one wants to take the shortest time.
Why snells law must be followed to travel diffrent media in shortest time?
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user102917
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Relation between Wave equation of light and photon wave function?
Suppose in our double slit experimental setup with the usual notations $d,D$, we have a beam of light of known frequency $(\nu)$ and wavelength $(\lambda)$ - so we can describe it as $$ξ_0 = A\sin(kx-\...
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Slit screen and wave-particle duality
In a double-slit experiment, interference patterns are shown when light passes through the slits and illuminate the screen. So the question is, if one shoots a single photon, does the screen show ...
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What does a de Broglie wave look like?
What does a de Broglie wave look like?
Are de Broglie waves transverse or longitudinal?
Can they be polarized?
What about the de Broglie wave of a ground state neutral spin-zero Helium 4 atom?
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How can a Photon have a "frequency"?
I picture light ray as a composition of photons with an energy equal to the frequency of the light ray according to $E=hf$. Is this the good way to picture this? Although I can solve elementary ...
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What is a phonon?
I am trying to understand intuitively what a phonon is, but for the moment I find it quite difficult (having a limited background in quantum mechanics, an undergraduate course in non-relativistic QM). ...
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What does it mean (how is it visualized) for a particle to act as a wave?
I have no background in physics. This isn't for homework, just for interest.
In quantum physics, it's described that a particle can act as both a particle and a wave.
Quoted from HowStuffWorks "Wave-...
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Wave/particle duality
Apologies if this has been asked before (I did check and I believe it wasn't). I have a question about the particle/wave duality of photons (or other particles). Depending on what and how we measure ...
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Does the uncertainty principle apply to photons?
Wikipedia claims the following:
More generally, the normal concept of a Schrödinger probability wave function cannot be applied to photons. Being massless, they cannot be localized without being ...
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What actually is white light?
I was studying spectra and suddenly a question popped up relating to the absorption spectra.
When we say that the electron absorbs certain wavelengths(photons) so we are implying that white light is a ...
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Are double-slit patterns really due to wave-like interference?
According to various sources on the web, it seems like the general concensus is that there isn't actually any wave-particle duality with quantum particles. For example, this article implies that ...
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Double Slit Experiment. What effect does the detector actually cause?
When a quantum of light arrives at a double slit, it passes through both slits as a wave and arrives upon a second screen with the interference pattern of a single wave that has been split into two ...
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Electrons - What is Waving?
If an electron is a wave, what is waving?
So many answers on the internet say "the probability that a particle will be at a particular location"... so... the electron is a physical manifestation of ...
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What is light, and how can it travel in a vacuum forever in all directions at once without a medium?
I know there are many questions that are similar (maybe identical?). I am not a physicist nor a student - I am just interested in physics and have been watching many physics channels on youtube ...
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What exactly are light waves?
We know a sound wave is a disturbance that moves through a medium when particles of the medium set neighboring particles in motion. And using the pressure variations we can plot a
pressure/time graph ...
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De Broglie wavelength, frequency and velocity - interpretation
Two fundamental equations regarding wave-particle duality are:
$$ \lambda = \frac{h}{p},
\\
\nu = E/h .$$
We talk about de Broglie wavelength, is it meaningful to talk about de Broglie frequency ($\...
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Wave-particle duality
I have been trying to understand "wave-particle duality" and other cases related to it. I am currently a college level student. I have few question which I am not getting answers clearly.
In double ...
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Do photons occupy space?
Total noob here.
I realize that photons do not have a mass. However, they must somehow occupy space, as I've read that light waves can collide with one another.
Do photons occupy space? and if so, ...
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Why does observation collapse the wave function?
In one of the first lectures on QM we are always taught about Young's experiment and how particles behave either as waves or as particles depending on whether or not they are being observed. I want to ...
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Is the Uncertainty Principle valid for information about the past?
My layman understanding of the Uncertainty Principle is that you can't determine the both the position and momentum of a particle at the same point in time, because measuring one variable changes the ...
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Where does de Broglie wavelength $\lambda=h/p$ for massive particles come from?
I'm curious where the de Broglie relation $p=\frac{h}{\lambda}$ comes from?
I know that for light (which has no rest mass), the following is true:
$E=pc$ and $E=hf$
so,
$$pc=hf \Rightarrow p=\...
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How does the Wave Particle Duality fit with Quantum Field Theory?
It's heard quite often that fundamental particles (photons, quarks, etc) act as both particles and waves.
Now, I'm looking at it from a Quantum Field perspective. Is this localized energy ripple ...
user143777
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Is my understanding of the double-slit experiment correct?
I'm no quantum scientist. I'm just a software engineer with a healthy (?) fascination with quantum mechanics and knowledge gained from Googling. :) I've read many different articles about the double-...
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Which side of wave-particle duality to choose in a given situation
How does one know whether, in treating a certain problem, one should consider particles as waves or as point-like objects? Are there certain guidelines regarding this?
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Electromagnetic radiation and quanta
since electromagnetic radiation possess the property of both wave and particle(photon).
and both theory are applicable but how we have to find out that which theory is suitable or applicable in ...
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In diffraction process, how to describe the edge in the sense of particle-wave duality?
In diffraction experiments photons show behind an edge intensity distributions in the form of fringes. It seems to be without doubt that the edge is a part of the game. My question is, how to describe ...
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How does the light source fire a single photon in the double-slit experiment
All the youtube videos I have seen on the double slit experiment broadly fall into one of the following three categories:
Documentaries and fan made videos heavy on animation which 'admire' the wave-...
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What was Newton's own explanation of Newton's rings?
What was Newton's own explanation of Newton's rings? Newton advocated a corpuscular theory of light, but his rings would most conveniently be explained by a wave theory. How did he explain his own ...
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Will a football (soccer) diffract? [duplicate]
Apparently all objects have wavelike properties, so, if we kick a football (soccer ball, if you must) through a pair of posts, does the ball in any sense diffract?
If this is ridiculous then let me ...
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Is the size of a photon dependent on its wavelength?
When detecting radio waves in space, we use very large telescopes or arrays of telescopes. But according to QM, aren't photons point particles when measured? Does a photon with a large wavelength ...
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Largest Mass Diffraction
I have read "Matter-wave interference with particles selected from a molecular library with masses exceeding 10000 amu" which claims to observe diffraction patterns in objects of around 10'...
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Corpuscular theory of light and Double slit experiment
Physicists would initially have attempted to explain Young's double slit experiment's results using the concept of light as a stream of particles, ryt? Can somebody tell me what these attempts were ...
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Uncertainty and wave-trains
My textbook and the following extract from feynman's lectures present the same idea regarding wavetrains and uncertainty in their wavelengths. Why is it that a wavetrain confined to some space has an ...
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Particle- and wave-like properties
Is wave-particle duality a real concept or a pedagogical tool? In a less opinion-based way: what are particle properties and wave properties of a particle (that we speak of particle properties of ...
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What do we see while watching light? Waves or particles?
I'm trying to understand quantum physics. I'm pretty familiar with it but I can't decide what counts as observing to cause particle behave (at least when it's about lights). So the question is what do ...
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Does electron in wave form have mass?
I heard from my lecturer that electron has dual nature. For that instance in young's double slit experiment electron exhibits as a particle at ends but it acts as a wave in between the ends. It under ...
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Can an electron be in two places at the same time?
So I've been reading a bit and watching some videos about the double slit experiment, and therefore the wave particle duality; I've also read this "implies" that a particle can be in two places at the ...
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How does the frequency of a particle manifest itself?
In terms of wave-particle duality for, let's say a photon; how would the frequency practically manifest/demonstrate itself? Like, i understand that the frequency is related to the energy a particle ...
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Does Quantum Theory allow an Electron to take a fraction of Photon energy
In Photoelectric Effect of Theory of Spectral Lines , an electron takes the entire or none of the energy of the Photon ( it absorbs the entire quanta not its fractionS resulting in the disappearance ...
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Is a single photon also a Maxwellian wave?
A photon is associated with the equations $h\nu$ and $\frac{hc}{\lambda}$.
My book (Serway Modern Physics) says that Einstein explained the photoelectric effect by assuming that the classical ...
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Does a particle interact with walls of a slit?
It is kind of mystical that a particle goes through a slit and eventually changes its impulse due to Heisenberg uncertainty. Since the slit is an opening, it must not have interacted with it. Does it ...
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How do light interference patterns correspond to the particle nature of light?
Interference patterns like those produced by a two-slit experiment make sense to me when I imagine light as a wave, with peaks cancelling out troughs in some locations and two peaks adding together in ...
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Is the single slit experiment a practical example of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?
I saw some videos where a person points a laser through a slit. As they reduce the width of the slit, the diffracted image spreads out, like this:
Can this pattern be viewed as a consequence of ...
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Is an elementary particle traveling through a vacuum the *same* particle at points A and B?
This is a question I've wondered about for a long time.
Imagine an elementary particle moving through a vacuum. Take any two arbitrary points along its path; we'll call them points A and B. Is the ...
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wavefunction collapse and uncertainty principle
We all know that wavefunction collapse when it is observed. Uncertainty principle states that $\sigma_x \sigma_p \geq \frac {\hbar}{2}$. When wavefunction collapse, doesn't $\sigma_x$ become $0$?, as ...
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How Does the Electron Detector Detect Electrons? Dbl Slit
The double slit experiment is famous for the electron acting like a particle rather than a wave when observed. Is it the case that the nature of the detection apparatus rather than passively taking ...
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What is a wave? What is a particle?
I am reading a David Bohm book on quantum theory. He says the idea that light is both a particle and a wave is incompatible:
(1) we know light has particle-like properties through the photoelectric ...
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