3 ms·
Does that mean that an individual and unique photon travels the full distance from transmitter to receiver without interacting with anything? That seems... rea
by mystified5016 2y ago
Does that mean that an individual and unique photon travels the full distance from transmitter to receiver without interacting with anything?
That seems... really difficult. I'd always assumed fiber operates by continually absorbing and reemitting photons at low loss. Maybe I've fundamentally misunderstood optics.
- amluto 2y ago> Does that mean that an individual and unique photon travels the full distance from transmitter to receiver without interacting with anything? Sort of. There will always be attenuation, which is more or less equivalent to losing some fraction of photons. And one can thing of the interaction of light with glass as the photons being absorbed and re-emitted, but thinking about that way doesn’t actually change the result. And, in any case, there isn’t really any such thing as an individual photon: photons are indistinguishable bosons. In any case, the photons absolutely do interact on the way, but that interaction usually does not affect their polarization, and one of the many counterintuitive effects of quantum mechanics is that, if the polarization is intact, then no one learned it along the way. Quantum mechanics is bizarre.