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I'd be curious to see the dual-slit experiment done using this camera as the "observer". I'm not sure it'd yield anything we don't already "know" - but it migh
by cr0sh 7y ago
I'd be curious to see the dual-slit experiment done using this camera as the "observer".
I'm not sure it'd yield anything we don't already "know" - but it might be worth trying just because.
- lqet 7y agoI wondered exactly the same thing (see my other comment). However, I am not sure if they can actually film single photons. My school physics are a bit rusty, but iirc, quantum effects will not be relevant if you actually fire a light "impulse" consisting of many, many photons. However, as I have asked in my previous comment, it would be interesting if you could actually see the light impulse being "split up" and interfering with itself.
- rusk 7y agoIf you could do that then you could also know the fate of Schrödinger’s cat ...
- pathseeker 7y agoYou can only "film" something when the photons hit the "film" (a.k.a the image sensor). There's no way to record photons flying by.
- fastball 7y agoIs it not possible for the energy of a photon to to disrupt EM fields enough to be detectable, without the photon actually being incident on a sensor?
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoKinda, no. By observing a photon you perturb the system, you wouldn't get a result for what that photon would have done had it not been perturbed. AIUI if you detect the photon then it interacted with some part of your sensing apparatus, so it didn't then go on to do what it should have. Thus we're left to look at the aftermath and impute the situation that produced it.
- fsh 7y agoYes, this is called a "quantum non-demolition measurement" and has actually been done. One technique is to use highly excited atoms (Rydberg atoms) which are extremely sensitive to external electric fields. In this way, the field caused by a single photon can be detected without absorbing the photon. There is a famous paper from Serge Haroche's group where they used this method to detect the presence of single microwave photons in a superconducting cavity (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05589 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05589). However, the measurement still collapses the wavefunction of the system. Performing a QND measurement to determine which slit the photon takes in a double-slit experiment simply destroys the interference pattern.
- xhrpost 7y agoCurious, what is "the field generated by a single photon" made of? Off hand, I think the force carrier for EM fields is the photon no? So, the photon is emitting other photons (virtual I think?) then?
- foxyv 7y agoYou can detect single photons. There are off the shelf detectors for available for experimenting with photon entanglement and parametric down conversion. We had one at my university. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_counting
- lutorm 7y agoYou can't make movies with them though... It would make an expensive camera. ;-)
- ivalm 7y agoIn this example they are capturing light scattered from the main pulse as it passes through the medium, they are no capturing the light pulse itself. If there is one photon then you can observe it only once (when it is absorbed by your detector).
- lisper 7y agoNot really. The double-slit experiment is only interesting when done with single photons, and this camera can't capture that (no camera can).