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A simplified diagram of the MIT experiment, with two atoms being held in place by a laser beam and acting as two slots that can scatter individual photons and create an interference pattern. . | Credit: V. Fedoseev et al.
For over 100 years, quantum physics has been teaching us that light is both a wave and a particle. Now researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (with) have carried out a daring experiment using individual atoms, which confirms that the light, while light can behave either as a particle or a photon, but is not behavior at the same time.
The debate about the nature of light goes back to the 17th century and the time of Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens. Some, like Newton, believed that light from particles had to be made to explain why mirror images are sharp and our inability to be in the corners. And yet Huygens and others pointed out that light has wave -like behavior such as bending and refraction.
In 1801, the physicist Thomas Young developed the famous double-slit experiment, in which he shone a coherent light source through two narrow slots and on a wall. If light were a particle, we would expect two overlapping light spots to appear on the wall when different photons go through each of the two slots. Instead, Young found that the light in changing interference patterns from light and dark was spread out on the wall. This could only be explained if light waves spread from every slit and interact with each other, which led to constructive and destructive disorders.
A century later, Max Planck showed that warmth and light in tiny packages called Quanta are emitted, and Albert Einstein showed that a light quantum is a particle that is referred to as photon. In addition, quantum physics showed that photons also have wave -like behavior. So Newton and Huygens both had correctly: light is both a wave and a particle. We call this bizarre phenomenon of wave particle duality.
However, the principle of uncertainty states that we can never observe a photon as a wave and particle at the same time. The father of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, called this “complementarity” in the sense that complementary properties of a quantum system such as a wave and a particle can never be measured at the same time.
Einstein was never a lover of randomness, the complementarity and the principle of uncertainty introduced in the natural laws. So he looked for paths to refute complementarity, and he returned to Young’s Classic Double-Slit experiment. He argued that a photon runs through one of the slots, the sides of the slot should feel a small force because they become “rasisled” through the passing photon. In this way we were able to measure the light that acts as a photon particle when it moves through a slit and as a wave when they interact with other photons.
Bohr disagreed. The principle of uncertainty describes how we do not know, for example, the impulse of a photon and its exact position – both complementary properties. Therefore, drill that measured the “rustling” of the temporary photon would only lead to the wave-like behavior, and the interference pattern generated by the double-sit experiment would be replaced by only two lighting stains.
Experiments over the years have shown that drilling is correct, but there was always the small, gnawing doubts that bulky devices could introduce effects that see the light as a wave and a particle at the same time.
A fundamental presentation of the standard double-slit experiment, which you may have carried out in school science lessons. | Credit: future
To tackle this, the co-team, led by physicists Wolfgang Ketterle and Vitaly Fedoseev, reduced the double-liter experiment to the nuclear scale to the most important apparatus. They arranged 10,000 individual atoms with lasers, which were cooled to just one degree over absolute zero. Each atom looked like a slit, in the sense that photons could distribute them in different directions and, through many tests, create a pattern from light and dark areas, based on the probability that a photon is more distributed in certain directions than others. In this way, the scatter creates the same diffraction pattern as the double-lit experiment.
“What we have done can be seen as a new variant for a double-slit experiment,” said Ketterle in an explanation. “These individual atoms are like the smallest slots that they could possibly build.”
The experiment showed that Bohr was definitely right when he spoke out for complementarity and that Einstein misunderstood it. The more nuclear curl, the weaker the flexion pattern, since the photons, which were measured as particles, no longer disturbed the photons that were not measured as particles.
The experiments also showed that the apparatus – in this case the laser rays that kept the atoms in place – did not affect the results. The Ketterle and Fedoseev team were able to switch off the lasers and make a measurement within a millionth second before the atoms had the chance to wiggle or move. The result was always the same – the particle and the waves of nature of light could not be recognized at the same time.
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“What matters is only the blurring of the atoms,” said Fedoseev. This blurring refers to the quantum shears, which surrounds the exact position of an atom in accordance with the principle of uncertainty. This blurring can be adjusted to how firmly the lasers keep the atoms in position, and the blurred and loose the atoms, the more they feel the photons they rustle, which reveals light as a particle.
“Einstein and Bohr never thought that this was possible to carry out such an experiment with individual atoms and individual photons,” said Ketterle.
The experiment continues to cement the craziness of quantum physics in which particles have a double nature, and we can never measure complementary properties at the same time, whether light is a shaft or particle or the position and the impulse of this particle. The universe seems to work on the basis of the probability, and the properties that we come from the quantum sector are just the manifestation of statistics in which many particles are involved, all of which “play”.
Research was published on July 22nd in the journal Physical Review Letters.
