Physicists Simulate Split Photon, Finding States From 0 to Infinite Photons
Updated
Updated · Livescience.com · Jun 17
Physicists Simulate Split Photon, Finding States From 0 to Infinite Photons
2 articles · Updated · Livescience.com · Jun 17
Summary
A theoretical photon cut by a shutter does not reduce neatly to one photon or none; the team calculated a mixed quantum state spanning 0 to infinitely many photons.
Physical Review Letters accepted the study, which models a shutter closing while a photon wave is still passing through and shows the outcome depends on how fast the cutoff happens.
Infinitely many photons appear only in the limit of an infinitely fast shutter; at realistic speeds, even 1,000 photons would be extremely unlikely.
Measurements also look contradictory locally: on one side of the shutter the state appears as a single photon, while on the other it appears as vacuum, despite the global zero-to-infinity mixture.
The researchers say that behavior could help build cleaner, causal descriptions of particle interactions and may be explored next for particles such as electrons.