For more than 100 years, quantum physics has taught us that light is both a wave and a particle. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made a courageous experiment using single atoms that confirm, while the light can behave either as a particle or photon, it cannot be seen to behave as both at the same time.
The debate about the nature of light goes back to centuries, until the 17th century and the time of Isaac Newton and Cristian Husens. Some like Newton, it believed that light was to be made from particles to explain why mirror images are sharp and our inability to look around the corners. And yet, huygens and others said, the light displays wave-like behavior, such as diffraction and refraction.
In 1801, physicist Thomas Young designed the famous double-slit experiment, where he brightened two narrow slits and a consistent light source on a wall. If the light was a particle, we would expect two overlapping spots of light appear on the wall because different photons pass through each of two slits. Instead, Young found that the intervention of light and darkness was spread on the wall in the pattern. This can only be explained when light waves are spreading out of each slit and interacting with each other, resulting in creative and destructive intervention.
A century later, Max Planck showed that heat and light are excreted in small packets called Quanta, and Albert Einstein showed that a quantum of light is a particle called a photon. What is more, quantum physics showed that photons also display a wave -like behavior. So both Newton and Houshes were correct: light is both a wave and a particle. We call this bizarre event a wave and duality.
Nevertheless the principle of uncertainty suggests that we can never inspect a photon acting as both a wave and a particle at the same time. The father of quantum physics, Niels Bohar, said this “supplementation”, in the sense that the complementary properties of a quantum system, such as a wave and a particle, can never be measured together.
Einstein was never a lover of randomism that supplemented and uncertainty theory was introduced in the laws of nature. So he searched for ways to reject the supplement, and in doing so he went back to the classic double-slit of Young. He argued that, as a photon passes through one of the slits, the edges of the slit should feel a small strength because they “rust” by the passing photon. In this way, we can measure light acting together as a photon particle because it moves through a kiln, and as a wave when interacting with other photons.
Bohar disagree. Uncertainty theory suggests how, for example, we cannot know at the same time – both complementary properties – the speed of a photon and its exact position. Therefore, Bohr said, measuring the “rustle” of the passing photon will only result in scrubbing the wave-like behavior, and the intervention pattern produced by the double-slit experiment will be replaced with only two bright spots.
Over the years, experiments have shown Bohr to be correct, but always small, ugly doubts that heavy mechanisms can introduce the effects that show the light as a wave as a mask and simultaneously as a particle.
To address this, the MIT team, led by physicists Wolfgang Cateral and Vitley Fedosave, put down the double-slit experiment for the most basic equipment, on the nuclear scale. Using the lasers, they arranged 10,000 individual atoms, which cooled only fractions of the degree above the absolute zero. Each atom acted like a kiln, in the sense that photons can spread them in different directions and many tests produce a pattern of light and dark areas, based on the possibility that a photon will be scattered in some directions than others. In this way, the scattering produces the same diffraction patterns the same as double-slit experiment.
“What we have done can be considered as a new version for double-slit experiment.” “These single atoms are like the smallest slits that you can possibly make.”
The experiment revealed that Bohr was certainly correct when he argued for the supplement, and that Einstein went wrong. The more atomic-rugistic measured, the weak diffraction pattern became, as the photons that were measured as particles, were no longer interfered with photons that were not measured to be particles.
Experiments also revealed that the equipment – in this case the laser beam atoms hold in place – does not affect the results. The team of Catel and Fedosaves were able to close the lease and make a measurement within a second of a second of doing so, before the atoms got a chance to visit or go under gravity. The result was always the same – the particles and waves of light could not be understood simultaneously.
“What matters is the only wastefulness of atoms,” Fedosave said. According to the principle of fasting uncertainty, it refers to quantum fasting that surrounds the exact position of an atom. This fusiness can be tuned from how firm the lasers are caught in position, and, more fuzzy and dysfunctional atoms are organized, the more they feel that the photons have a rustle, so the light manifests the light as a particle.
“Einstein and Bohr would never have thought that it was possible, to use such an experiment with single atoms and single photons,” said Calerl.
The experiment further strengthens the bizarreness of quantum physics, which has a dual nature in particles, and we can never measure the complementary properties simultaneously such as light is a wave or a particle, or the position and speed of that particle. The universe works on the basis of probability, and the emission properties that we see coming from the quantum realm are only expression of data associated with many particles, all, Einstein’s Chagarin, “Play Dice”.
The research was published in the journal Physical Review Letters on 22 July.
