Simultaneous observation of quantization and interference pattern | Hacker News Reader

Simultaneous observation of quantization and interference pattern

nature.com

34 pointslelf9 comments

With my understanding of "the dual nature of light", a better headline would be "The first ever photograph of light as neither a particle or wave", i.e. if it was a wave it wouldn't do this (hold a standing wave) and that (exchange quanta with electrons) at the same time.

Why do I say "neither" is better than "both"? It makes light seem like something different, rather than something that spookily is two things depending on what you're doing.

Feynman seemed to me to argue for just accepting that you're working with models of things that might not have human-scale analogues, and not to get caught up with what they "really" are.

[This comment is from before a link to a poorly titled phys.org article was changed so that it pointed to the nature paper itself. He is not arguing that the title of the actual article is a bad title.]

It's true that I wouldn't have complained if the link originally pointed to nature.com (rather than originally pointing to phys.org and then being edited to point to nature.com) but it's also true that I wouldn't have had the time or ability to work through so much as the abstract, which I find utterly, utterly impenetrable, even with a non-trivial interest in physics, and make any comment at all.

In its defense, the phys.org article embedded a video with a much more accessible explanation of what happened.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlaVHxUSiNk

The video is imperfect, there are a number of unnecessary over simplifications and patronizing sounds and silly faces, but I still found it more informative than the article.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'm not sure if I would call this a photograph

The same argument could be used for any photographs of far off galactic masses which are made by taking light not visible to the human eye and converting it into an image, which are usually accepted as accurate representations.

They still use photons... and nearly all cameras are sensitive to frequencies outside visible spectrum.

I agree. I think this is a more complex experiment, not a "photography". I'm not a classification fanatic; I can classify electron microscopy as "photography", but this is too diferent.

They do have some pretty neat pictures of the surface of a sample nanowire outlined by what they think are SPPs, but calling it a "first ever photo of a photon as both a wave and a particle" seems like it's stretching things a bit.

From what I understand, they're basically shooting an IR and UV laser pulse separated by a short(femptosecond) delay at the surface of a nanowire, and then using the interaction between a beam of electrons passing near the surface of the wire to gauge surface excitation as a result of the laser pulses. In theory, the surface electrons enter an excitation state from the laser pulse and then shortly thereafter exchange their quanta with the electron beam.

Because light is quantized, the excitation state is reached, but because it is a field with wave-like characteristics the excitation states in the surface electrons appear to exhibit a standing-wave pattern.

This is pretty fantastic.

We updated the URL from http://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html, which points to this.

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