The wave-particle duality revisited

Pre-script (dated 26 June 2020): This post has become less relevant (even irrelevant, perhaps) because my views on all things quantum-mechanical have evolved significantly as a result of my progression towards a more complete realist (classical) interpretation of quantum physics. I keep blog posts like these mainly because I want to keep track of where I came from. I might review them one day, but I currently don’t have the time or energy for it. 🙂

Original post:

As an economist, having some knowledge of what’s around in my field (social science), I think I am well-placed to say that physics is not an easy science. Its ‘first principles’ are complicated, and I am not ashamed to say that, after more than a year of study now, I haven’t reached what I would call a ‘true understanding’ of it.

Sometimes, the teachers are to be blamed. For example, I just found out that, in regard to the question of the wave function of a photon, the answer of two nuclear scientists was plain wrong. Photons do have a de Broglie wave, and there is a fair amount of research and actual experimenting going on trying to measure it. One scientific article which I liked in particular, and I hope to fully understand a year from now or so, is on such ‘direct measurement of the (quantum) wavefunction‘. For me, it drove home the message that these idealized ‘thought experiments’ that are supposed to make autodidacts like me understand things better, are surely instructive in regard to the key point, but confusing in other respects.

A typical example of such idealized thought experiment is the double-slit experiment with ‘special detectors’ near the slits, which may or may not detect a photon, depending on whether or not they’re switched on as well as on their accuracy. Depending on whether or not the detectors are switched on, and their accuracy, we get full interference (a), no interference (b), or a mixture of (a) and (b), as shown in (c) and (d).

I took the illustrations from Feynman’s lovely little book, QED – The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, and he surely knows what he’s talking about. Having said that, the set-up raises a key question in regard to these detectors: how do they work, exactly? More importantly, how do they disturb the photons?

I googled for actual double-slit experiments with such ‘special detectors’ near the slits, but only found such experiments for electrons. One of these, a 2010 experiment of an Italian team, suggests that it’s the interaction between the detector and the electron wave that may cause the interference pattern to disappear. The idea is shown below. The electron is depicted as an incoming plane wave, which breaks up as it goes through the slits. The slit on the left has no ‘filter’ (which you may think of as a detector) and, hence, the plane wave goes through as a cylindrical wave. The slit on the right-hand side is covered by a ‘filter’ made of several layers of ‘low atomic number material’, so the electron goes through but, at the same time, the barrier creates a spherical wave as it goes through. The researchers note that “the spherical and cylindrical wave do not have any phase correlation, and so even if an electron passed through both slits, the two different waves that come out cannot create an interference pattern on the wall behind them.” [Needless to say, while being represented as ‘real’ waves here, the ‘waves’ are, in fact, complex-valued psi functions.]

In fact, to be precise, there actually still was an interference effect if the filter was thin enough. Let me quote the reason for that: “The thicker the filter, the greater the probability for inelastic scattering. When the electron suffers inelastic scattering, it is localized. This means that its wavefunction collapses and, after the measurement act, it propagates roughly as a spherical wave from the region of interaction, with no phase relation at all with other elastically or inelastically scattered electrons. If the filter is made thick enough, the interference effects cancels out almost completely.”

This, of course, doesn’t solve the mystery. The mystery, in such experiments, is that, when we put detectors, it is either the detector at A or the detector at B that goes off. They should never go off together—”at half strength, perhaps?”, as Feynman puts it. That’s why I used italics when writing “even if an electron passed through both slits.” The electron, or the photon in a similar set-up, is not supposed to do that. As mentioned above, the wavefunction collapses or reduces. Now that’s where these so-called ‘weak measurement’ experiments come in: they indicate the interaction doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not all or nothing: our observations should not necessarily destroy the wavefunction. So, who knows, perhaps we will be able, one day, to show that the wavefunction does go through both slits, as it should (otherwise the interference pattern cannot be explained), and then we will have resolved the paradox.

I am pretty sure that, when that’s done, physicists will also be able to relate the image of a photon as a transient electromagnetic wave (first diagram below), being emitted by an atomic oscillator for a few nanoseconds only (we gave the example for sodium light, for which the decay time was 3.2×10^–8 seconds) with the image of a photon as a de Broglie wave (second diagram below). I look forward to that day. I think it will come soon.