Textbook suggests that before conducting a double slit experiment, incoherent light is first passed through a single slit to make a coherent point source of light; the point source can be explained by Huygen's Principle. However, how would incoherent light before the slit become coherent if the point sources are created unperiodically (at uneven intervals)? Diagrams seen on text books seem to assume a conherent light source before the slit, so the conversion to coherent light is not explained. Thanks in advance.
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This is a diagram showing the single slit interference set up:    The pinhole (or 'peep hole') is said to 'produce a parallel beam of coherent light, because the time interval between light passing through the pinhole and single slit is constant, producing a constant phase difference'.  However, how would this create coherent light, because the filament lamp is an incoherent source, meaning it emits light at random, so wouldn't rays emerging from the peep-hole also emerge at random?  Also is the peephole even necessary? Because the slit by itself would be narrow enough to create coherent light?
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Quantum Mechanics is very successful in determining the overall statistical distribution of many measurements of the same process.  On the other hand, it is completely clueless in determining the outcome of a single measurement. It can only describe it as having a "random" outcome within the predicted distribution.  Where does this randomness come from? Has physics "given up" on the existence of microscopic physical laws by saying that single measurements are not bound to a physical law?  As a side note: repeating the same measurement over and over with the same apparatus makes the successive measurements non-independent, statistically speaking. There could be a hidden "stateful" mechanism influencing the results. Has any study of fundamental QM features been performed taking this into account? What was the outcome?    Edit: since 2 out of 3 questions seem to me not to answer my original question, maybe a clarification on the question itself will improve the quality of the page :-)  The question is about why single measurements have the values they have. Out of the, say, 1000 measure that make a successful QM experiment, why do the single measurements happen in that particular order? Why does the wave function collapse to a specific eigenvalue and not another? It's undeniable that this collapse (or projection) happens. Is this random? What is the source of this randomness?  In other words: what is the mechanism of choice?    Edit 2: More in particular you can refer to chapter 29 of "The road to reality" by Penrose, and with special interest page 809 where the Everett interpretation is discussed - including why it is, if not wrong, quite incomplete.
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In a double-slit experiment, interference patterns are shown when light passes through the slits and illuminate the screen. So the question is, if one shoots a single photon, does the screen show interference pattern? Or does the screen show only one location that the single photon particle is at?
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Yesterday I read that we can affect the path and the 'form' (particle or wave) of a photon after the fact ().  Part of what is puzzling me is the beam-splitter. Are the individual photons actually being split into two new photons of lesser energy?  This  implies that you cannot split a photon but it seems that beam splitters do exactly that.
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Last night my daughter was asking why a mirror "always does that" (referring to reflecting a spot of light). To help her figure it out, I grabbed my green laser pointer so she could see the light traveling from the source and reflecting off the mirror.  But as we were playing, I .  Rather than one spot, there were several. When I adjusted the angle to something fairly obtuse    The effect became quite pronounced    And when you looked closely, you could actually see several beams   (Of course, the beams actually looked like beams in real life. The picture gives the beams an elongated hourglass shape because those parts are out of focus.)  I made these observations:   The shallower the angle, the greater the spread of the split beams and resulting dots. The directionality of the reflection is due to the orientation of the mirror, not the laser pointer itself. Indeed, by rotating the mirror 360° the string of dots would make a full rotation as well. I can count at least 8 individual dots on the wall, but I could only see 6 beams with the naked eye. If you look at the split beam picture you can see a vertical line above the most intense dots. I didn't observe any intense spots of light there.   And when I looked closely at the spot where the beam hit the mirror    you can see a double image. This was not due to camera shake, just the light reflecting off the dust on the surface of the glass, and a reflection of that light from the rear surface of the mirror.  It's been a few years since college physics, I remembered doing things like the double split experiment. I also remembered that light seems like it does some strange things when it enters liquid/prisms. I also know that the green laser has a certain wavelength, and you can .  Why does the mirror split the laser beam? How does that explain the effects that I saw? Is there any relation to the double split experiment, or the wavelength/speed of light?
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If you emit a single photon, wait an interval, emit a second photon, wait the same interval, and keep repeating, is the resultant stream of photons describable by the frequency at which you emitted each one? Or does each photon have its own "frequency", independent of the rate of emission? I thought the former description explained the Doppler effect.
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Greatings!  I'm trying to understand special relativity and have one question bugging me.  In almost every book or video about the subject there is a thought experiment with moving light clock. I hope I need not elaborate on the sutup and the outcome of the experiment.  So the question is this: When a light source on the MOVING light clock emits a photon of light the path of the photon is triangular.   How this can be?   I thought since light speed is constant in every reference frame the movment of the "emmiter" can't affect the movment of the light so light should shoot right up (from the point of stationary observer) and thus move backward and up from the point of moving observer.  So you see my logic is: light speed is invariant => you can't make it move UP &amp; FORWARD only UP. i.e. you can't change it's direction once it's emited in UP direction. Why the hell light moves sideways then?  And I'm puzzeled. There is flaw in the logic but I don't see it.  Thanks for help.
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In double slit experiment only small sized particles were used. however if we use large objects such as a tennis ball, the expected pattern is not observed.   Why the wave nature is not visible for large objects in double slit experiment ? How do I then prove that large objects also have wave nature?
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My Young's slits experiment doesn’t work. I mean I tried to see wave effect of light but I didn’t see any thing expect particles! I’ve sent you a pic of my laser and a short video of the experiment. Is there any problem you think?
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I was wondering if quantum particles do actually  exists in two different states simultaneously and if it has been proven they do indeed exists in a superposition of states.  How has it been figured out since observing it would collapse the wave-function into one single state (two superposition of states into one ) as it has been mentioned in the Schrodinger's cat experiment?
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I have very little background in physics, so I apologize if this question is painfully naive.  Consider the following thought experiment: an observer is in a closed room whose walls, floor, and ceiling are made entirely of mirrors, with a single light source in the middle of the room. When the light is on, the observer can see many copies of his reflection all over the place.  Suddenly, the light source turns itself off. Intuitively, I would expect the observer to "instantly" see darkness. However, I can't figure out why that is the case under the "particle" interpretation of light. There are obviously lots of photons already in the room from before. Furthermore, we know that they don't get "consumed" when they hit a wall, because otherwise the observer wouldn't see so many reflections of himself. Basically, when the light goes off, what happens to the photons already in the room?  I suspect the answer goes something like this: the photons in the room lose a little bit of energy every time they bounce off a mirror, but it's so minuscule that we can still see more reflections than our eye can resolve anyway. When the light goes off, however, it takes them a very small fraction of a second to bounce around the room enough times to diffuse completely, which our eye cannot detect.  Is that about right? If we had a theoretical "perfect reflector", would the light remain trapped in the room forever? If we had instruments that could measure such things very finely, would it take (slightly) longer for the light to go out in a room made of mirrors as opposed to a room made of, say, black cloth?
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In many experiments in quantum mechanics, a single photon is sent to a mirror which it passes through or bounces off with 50% probability, then the same for some more similar mirrors, and at the end we get interference between the various paths. This is fairly easy to observe in the laboratory.  The interference means there is no which-path information stored anywhere in the mirrors. The mirrors are made of 10^20-something atoms, they aren't necessarily ultra-pure crystals, and they're at room temperature. Nonetheless, they act on the photons as very simple unitary operators. Why is it that the mirrors retain no or very little trace of the photon's path, so that very little decoherence occurs?  In general, how do I look at a physical situation and predict when there will be enough noisy interaction with the environment for a quantum state to decohere?
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Will I receive an interference pattern on D0 detector   if D1, D2, D3, D4 exist in the set up of the experiment, but they are thousands of light years far? Simply, to set up the experiment so that I detect all of the signal photons on D0 before I detect any of idler photons!
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I understand that faster-than-light communication is impossible when making single measurements, because the outcome of each measurement is random. However, shouldn't measurement on one side collapse the wave function on the other side, such that interference effects would disappear? Making measurements on "bunches" of entangled particles would thus allow FTL communication, by making observed interference effects appear or disappear. How does such an experiment not:  1) Clearly imply that faster-than-light communication is possible?  or  2) (if #1 is rejected) Imply that measurement of one half of an entangled pair does not cause the collapse of the other half's wave function.  Why doesn't this thought experiment clearly show that if we maintain that FTL communication is ruled out, we must also rule out "universal collapse" in the Copenhagen interpretation?  EDIT: Here is an example of an explicit experiment (though I think experts could come up with something better):  You can entangle a photon with an electron such that the angle of the photon is correlated with the electron's position at each slit of a double slit experiment. If the photon is detected (it's outgoing angle measured), then which-path information is known, and there is no interference. If the photon is not detected, the interference remains.   The experiment is designed such that the photon and electron go in roughly opposite directions, apart from the tiny deflection which gives which-path information. You set up a series of photon detectors 100 ly away on one side, and your double slit experiment 100 ly away in the opposite direction. Now you produce the entangled pairs in bunches, say of 100 entangled pairs, each coming every millisecond, with a muon coming between each bunch to serve as a separator.   Then the idea is that someone at the photon detector side can send information to someone watching the double-slit experiment, by selectively detecting all of the photons in some bunches, but not in others. If all of the photons are detected for one bunch, then the corresponding electron bunch 200 ly away should show no interference effects. If all of the photons are not detected for one bunch, then the corresponding electron bunch 200 ly away would show the usual double-slit interference effects (say on a phosphorus screen). (Note that this does not require combining information from the photon-detector-side with the electron-double-slit side in order to get the interference effects. The interference effects would visibly show up as the electron blips populate the phosphorus screen, as is usual in a double-slit experiment when which-path information is not measured.)  In such a way the person at the photon detectors can send '1's and '0's depending on whether they measure the photons in a given bunch. Suppose they send 'SOS' in Morse code. This requires 9 bunches, and so this will take 900 milliseconds, which is less than 200 years. The point is that such an experiment would only work if you assume that the measurement of the photon really does collapse the wave function nonlocally.
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Theoretically, if I shined a laser at a mirror at an angle of 0 degrees so that the light was perfectly reflected back to the light source, then I should not be able to see the light because it is not reflected to my eyes.  | |  me | |============ laser | | |   However this is evidently not the case, as I am able to see the laser point on the mirror. Why is this the case? My initial assumption is that it is due to diffuse reflection on the imperfect mirror's surface, but I am not sure.
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This is a summary from Physics World of the paper: L J Wang et al. 2000 Nature 406 277-- "Wang and colleagues begin by using a third continuous-wave laser to confirm that there are two peaks in the gain spectrum and that the refractive index does indeed change rapidly with wavelength in between. Next they send a 3.7-microsecond long laser pulse into the caesium cell, which is 6 centimetres long, and show that, at the correct wavelength, it emerges from the cell 62 nanoseconds sooner than would be expected if it had travelled at the speed of light. 62 nanoseconds might not sound like much, but since it should only take 0.2 nanoseconds for the pulse to pass through the cell, this means that the pulse has been travelling at 310 times the speed of light. Moreover, unlike previous superluminal experiments, the input and output pulse shapes are essentially the same."   I realise that the velocity of light in a medium is comprised of the phase velocity, the group velocity, and the front velocity. While the group velocity can exceed the value of c in a vacuum, the front velocity is not supposed to. The way this sounds, the front velocity is exceeding c in a vacuum by 310 times.    blue dot=phase velocity, green=group, red=front (wiki)  The wavepacket seems to exit the cell well before it enters, but the negative refractive index "forward shifts" the leading edge of the pulse. It is argued that although this is superluminal, information cannot be transmitted faster than c.  introduced a jump discontinuity into the waveform.Its max speed was c Here is a popular account from  . What if you used one photon? What if the photon itself were the information and not a carrier?
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This example purports to show reflection of light rays from a spherical mirror. It looks good, until you try to draw a ray from the tip of the candle flame, then through the focal point, $F$, and then emerging parallel to the optic axis $(CF)$.  Go ahead, draw it on your computer monitor screen, or print this page and draw it on the paper. Whoops! This ray should then pass through the image of the tip of the candle flame, but it doesn't!  Here's what you get when you draw the third light ray (in red) from the candle flame. It comes nowhere near the image of the candle flame. As soon as you draw some of the "missing" rays, you discover that the diagram becomes inconsistent.    According to me, the diagram seems to be perfect. From where did this anomaly come from? Please help.