Please help me here to see if I’m getting this. A particle or particles can be described by a wave function. Perturbations in a wave can be described by the ori

Please help me here to see if I’m getting this. A particle or particles can be described by a wave function. Perturbations in a wave can be described by the original (clean?) wave plus various other waves interfering with it. These other waves, which don’t actually exist independently of the perturbed particle wave, describe the virtual particles. Does that sound right? I’m wondering what this looks like if you observe these fields from a distance. Are ‘echoes’ of these perturbations and interactions detectable at a distance? In the diagrams in the article representations of these perturbations are shown between the particles, but do these perturbations propagate outside the scope of these interactions? If so, I’d have thought these would count as e.g. photons. I suppose not necessarily, not all energy levels in a quantum field are achievable, hence discrete discontinuities like absorption lines and electron shells, and in fact particles like electrons themselves. You can’t have a half strength perturbation in the electron field that adds up to half an electron. Do these perturbations fail to propagate outside the local interaction then?