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The Enigma that is Light

Jeremy Dunning-Davies, Richard Lawrence Norman

Published Jun 1, 2016• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The presently accepted notion of wave/particle duality, especially when applied to light, is undoubtedly a cause of great unease for many. Here the issue is examined afresh in the light of ideas put forward in recent years, especially by Mayants, while not forgetting the contributions of those great scientists of the past. Explanations and interpretations are then offered to account for seemingly paradoxical effects.

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The presently accepted notion of wave/particle duality, especially when applied to light, is undoubtedly a cause of great unease for many. Here the issue is examined afresh in the light of ideas put forward in recent years, especially by Mayants, while not forgetting the contributions of those great scientists of the past. Explanations and interpretations are then offered to account for seemingly paradoxical effects.
In the process of exploring the essence of light, Newton initially agreed with the particle interpretation of light while Huygens argued for the wave theory. Hence, these two theories had been disputed in Newton's time. In the beginning people accepted the particle theory, but after Thomas Young's experiment and Augustin Jean Fresnel's experiment, people began to accept the wave theory. Until Einstein proposed the quanta concept, which was later called photon, and, even later, De Broglie proposed the wave nature of matter, subsequently, people began using particle-wave duality to explicate all phenomena in micro world. Thus here appears a paradox: how can one particle exist in two forms? To solve this enigma, I have done some experiments; discover that moving photons create force; this effect reveal the phenomenon of light wave property - the inference fringes is caused by force which moving photons produced. The essence of light is particle but not particle-wave duality.
Light - the physicists' problem. The nature of light was the subject \nof such controversy ever since two schools of thought - one led by Newton, \nthe other by Huyghens - had proposed two different viewpoints of the nature \nof light. Newton viewed light as a stream of discrete particles while Huyghens \nmaintained that light was a form of wave-motion. As any O-level student \nknows, experimentation involving wave-properties such as diffraction (the \nfamous Young's slits experiments) eventually proved as correct Huyghens' \nidea of light as waves passing through a continium, which was eventually shown \nto be space itself by the Scot, James Clerk-MaxwelI in his work on electromagnetic \nradiation. By the end of the 19th Century, it seemed that light presented no problem. Light was waves.
Focusing on the unresolved debate between Newton and Huygens from 300 years ago, The Nature of Light: What is a Photon? discusses the reality behind enigmatic photons. It explores the fundamental issues pertaining to light that still exist today. Gathering contributions from globally recognized specialists in electrodynamics and quantum optics, the book begins by clearly presenting the mainstream view of the nature of light and photons. It then provides a new and challenging scientific epistemology that explains how to overcome the prevailing paradoxes and confusions arising from the accepted definition of a photon as a monochromatic Fourier mode of the vacuum. The book concludes with an array of experiments that demonstrate the innovative thinking needed to examine the wave-particle duality of photons. Looking at photons from both mainstream and out-of-box viewpoints, this volume is sure to inspire the next generation of quantum optics scientists and engineers to go beyond the Copenhagen interpretation and formulate new conceptual ideas about light-matter interactions and substantiate them through inventive applications.
The following Master’s thesis is concerned with several aspects of the wave-particle duality of light. It is loosely divided in three parts. In the first part we consider historical, theoretical and experimental aspects of the duality problem. We explain how the notion of duality has developed through the last 400 years. We discuss theoretical underpinnings of the duality emodied by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, quantization of electromagnetic modes, Fock’s states and coherent states. We critically review several experiments which serve to demonstrate the corpuscular or undulatory behaviour of light and matter; in particular we present how the photoelectric effect and the Compton effect can be explained using the undulatory model, and we critically review Grangier, Roger and Aspect correlation experiment.\n\nIn the second part we describe two illustrative experiments on the duality of light conducted at Quantum Optics Laboratory at University of Oslo. The results of the experiment allow us to discuss how coincidence measurements can be used to exhibit the corpuscular behaviour of light, and how Mach-Zender interferometry performed at very low intensity can be used to exhibit the undulatory behaviour at\nthe (assumed) single-photon level. In addition, in the second part we review elements of theories closely associated with the experiment and the experimental setup: optical coherence, photocount and photon\nstatistics, beam splitter models and Gaussian beams. A proposition for extending the semiclassical model is given, and shortcomings of the present beam splitter models are discussed.\n\nIn the third part of the thesis we consider first Afshar’s experiment and some of the critical response that it has been met with. Then we discuss how the wave-particle duality is to be understood in the\nstandard interpretation of quantum mechanics, and how it could possibly be explained using either an alternative model for light or an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics, and what difficulties such explanations present.