Cutting a photon in two creates an infinite swarm of particles

phys.org

4 points·HardwareLust··9 comments

So the mass of the universe would suddenly become infinite?

I thought photons didn't have any mass?

No. But they do have energy, and that creates gravity in general relativity (if I understand it correctly).

But also, you could have a Zeno's Paradox of particles - one with half the energy, one with 1/4th the energy, one with 1/8th...

To be clear, I personally did think that electrons had a non-zero mass, so my bad.

Do they even exist?

No, that infinite swarm is in a superposition, so each photon contributes only an infinitesimal amount of energy. The net effect from a distance acts exactly like the original photon.

Assuming it could be done at all, which it can't. The article says "If you could do an impossible thing you'd get a strange result", which, duh.

Wouldn't you need a tool that moves faster than the speed of light to cut a photon in half?

Not necessarily. They imagine a kind of shutter that could close in the middle of a photon's wave.

That's not quite as ridiculous as it sounds: a microwave photon could be centimeters long, and a lower-wavelength photon could be meters or more. You could think of the shutter as an LCD screen, which could change from clear to dark in less than the time it would take for a meters-long photon to pass through it.

You can't actually do it, though the speed of light isn't the reason. The calculation is for an infinitely thin, infinitely black barrier. You could do an approximation of it, but the complexity of the approximation swamps the already-complex wave form the theory gives.

Allegedly. I was disappointed to find out this is theoretical and they did not actually cut a photon in two.

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