POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Trivial trigonometry : Re: Trivial trigonometry Server Time
9 Oct 2024 00:22:00 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Trivial trigonometry  
From: Warp
Date: 30 Nov 2009 17:58:47
Message: <4b144e27@news.povray.org>
Sabrina Kilian <ski### [at] vtedu> wrote:
> You don't get the interference pattern with only one photon. You get it
> if you sum a lot of photons emitted one at a time. A single photon will
> still hit only one place*, but that place is more likely to be in one of
> the locations that you would expect from a wave.

  To put it more clearly:

  You don't need to send all the photons at the same time in order to get
the interference pattern. You can send photons one by one, with a significant
time interval between sending the photons, and you *still* get the exact
same interference pattern as if you had sent them all at the same time.
This means that a photon does not need other photons to interfere with in
order for the interference pattern to appear. A lonely photon traversing
through the double-slit will still present the same interference.

  I think that the vernacular interpretation is that the single photon
traverses as a wavefront and interferes with itself when it passes through
both slits at the same time.

-- 
                                                          - Warp


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