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Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences

The Concept of the Photon in Question

Indianara Lima Silva, Olival Freire

Published Nov 1, 2012• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The history of the concept of the photon in twentieth-century physics is far from a simple story opening with Einstein’s vision of light as a collection of indivisible particles whose energy and momentum are conserved during its interaction with matter, and reaching closure with the wave-particle duality as an accomplishment of quantum mechanics. Since then there has been an intermittent debate on the need for and adequacy of such a concept, even if this debate has been absent from the literature on the history of physics and from physics teaching. This paper analyzes a major event which led to the revival of this debate, namely, the experiment carried out by Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Quentin Twiss (HBT) in 1956 in the context of low-intensity interferometry. As part of their work to build a new kind of interferometer to measure the diameter of optical stars, their results seemed to suggest that photons split through two different channels and detectors. These results stirred up a debate involving Edward Purcell, Eric Brannen, Harry Ferguson, Peter Fellgett, Richard Sillitto, Lajos Jánossy, Leonard Mandel, and Emil Wolf, in addition to Hanbury Brown and Twiss themselves. The building of this device in astronomy thus renewed the old controversy about the nature of light. Later on, with the invention of lasers, the HBT experimental results played a role in developments leading to the creation of quantum optics and currently play a role in various fields in physics.

DOI
10.1525/hsns.2013.43.4.453

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The history of the concept of the photon in twentieth-century physics is far from a simple story opening with Einstein’s vision of light as a collection of indivisible particles whose energy and momentum are conserved during its interaction with matter, and reaching closure with the wave-particle duality as an accomplishment of quantum mechanics. Since then there has been an intermittent debate on the need for and adequacy of such a concept, even if this debate has been absent from the literature on the history of physics and from physics teaching. This paper analyzes a major event which led to the revival of this debate, namely, the experiment carried out by Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Quentin Twiss (HBT) in 1956 in the context of low-intensity interferometry. As part of their work to build a new kind of interferometer to measure the diameter of optical stars, their results seemed to suggest that photons split through two different channels and detectors. These results stirred up a debate involving Edward Purcell, Eric Brannen, Harry Ferguson, Peter Fellgett, Richard Sillitto, Lajos Jánossy, Leonard Mandel, and Emil Wolf, in addition to Hanbury Brown and Twiss themselves. The building of this device in astronomy thus renewed the old controversy about the nature of light. Later on, with the invention of lasers, the HBT experimental results played a role in developments leading to the creation of quantum optics and currently play a role in various fields in physics.
There are two opposing points of view on the nature of light: the first one manifests the wave-particle duality as a fundamental property of the nature; the second one claims that photons do not exist and the light is a continuous classical wave, while the so-called “quantum” properties of this field appear only as a result of its interaction with matter. In this paper we show that many quantum phenomena which are traditionally described by quantum electrodynamics can be described if light is considered within the limits of classical electrodynamics without quantization of radiation. These phenomena include the double-slit experiment, the photoelectric effect, the Compton effect, the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect, the so-called multiphoton ionisation of atoms, etc. We show that this point of view allows also explaining the “wave-particle duality” of light in Wiener experiments with standing waves. We show that the Born rule for light can easily be derived from Fermi’s golden rule as an approximation for low-intense light or for short exposure time. We show that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for “photons” has a simple classical sense and cannot be considered as a fundamental limitation of accuracy of simultaneous measurements of position and momentum or time and energy. We conclude that the concept of a “photon” is superfluous in explanation of light-matter interactions.
Quantum optics was born in the first years of the 20th century. The first papers leading to further ideas of quanta of light were presented by Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Their pioneering papers laid the foundations for the theory of quantum optics. However, one should remember that for the birth of the formal theory of quantisation of light, the development of quantum mechanics was necessary. Interestingly, the word ’photon’ appeared for the first time in a paper by a Gilbert Lewis, a chemist, in 1926 and was later used by P.A.M. Dirac, a physicist, the next year. The modern sense of the term quantum optics was established in 1956 when Hanbury Brown and Twiss built the intensity interferometr and performed their famous experiment in which correlations between two light beams were measured. Although the results of their experiment could be explained on the basis of the classical theory of light, with some quantumcomponent to the process of photodetection, their result is commonly accepted as the beginning of the modern quantum optics era. The next milestone in the development of quantum optics was the invention of laser in 1960. The physical properties of the light generated by lasers were considerably different from those characterising the light generated by classical thermal sources. This fact was a great impulse leading to further development of quantum optics’ ideas. The first of them were presented in the fundamental papers written by Glauber, describing new states of light quantum coherent states.
Optical interferometry was at the heart of the revolution which ushered in the new era of twentieth century physics. For example, the Michelson interferometer was used to show that there is no detectable motion relative to the ‘ether’; a key experiment in support of special relativity. It is a wonderful tribute to Michelson that the same interferometer concept is central to the gravity-wave detectors which promise to provide new insights into general relativity and astrophysics in the twenty-first century. Similar tales can be told about the Sagnac and Mach–Zehnder interferometers as discussed in this chapter. We further note that the intensity correlation stellar interferometer of Hanbury- Brown and Twiss was a driving force in ushering in the modern era of quantum optics. We are thus motivated to develop the theory of field (amplitude) and photon (intensity) correlation interferometry. In doing so we will find that the subject provides us with an exquisite probe of the micro and macrocosmos, i.e., quantum mechanics and general relativity. With these thoughts in mind we here develop a framework to study the quantum statistical correlations of light. We will motivate the quantum correlation functions of the field operators from the standpoint of photodetection theory. Many experimentally observed quantities, such as photoelectron statistics and the spectral distribution of the field, can be related to the appropriate field correlation functions. These correlation functions are essential in the description of Young's double-slit experiment and the notion of the power spectrum of light.
The emergence of Quantum Optics, in the second half of the 20th century, was closely related to landmark experiments, which were permitted by the development of single photon detection and correlation measurements. Photon correlation techniques allowed experimentalists to demonstrate effects closely linked to two-photon amplitudes interference with entangled states, a phenomenon emblematic of the second quantum revolution. In the Atom Optics group at Institut d'Optique, we revisit these experiments with photons replaced by metastable Helium atoms, which can be detected individually. After the Hanbury Brown Twiss and the Hong Ou Mandel experiments, we aim at realizing a test of Bell's inequalities with atoms entangled in momentum, i.e., in external degrees of freedom sensitive to mass.
In this lecture, I first present my views on the second vs the first quantum revolution, then describe the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect with photons, and indicate why it was so important in the development of modern quantum optics. The presentation of our experiments on the HBT effect with atoms will allow me to emphasize the analogies but also the increased richness of the effect when going from photons to atoms. I will similarly describe the HOM effect for photons and its significance, and then present the analogous experiment with atoms. In conclusion, I will put these two effects in the long list of landmarks in the development of quantum optics, and indicate what has been done and what remains to be done with atoms in lieu of photons.
The genesis of quantum optics can be found in the Dirac discussion on interference as disclosed in The Principles of Quantum Mechanics . This is a masterful and prophetic discussion that begins by considering a roughly monochromatic light source. The discussion continues by considering a beam of light consisting of a large number of photons. Besides Dirac, useful references on interferometry include Steel, Meaburn and Born and Wolf. The Hanbury Brown–Twiss effect originates in interferometric measurements performed by an “intensity interferometer” used for astronomical observations. A diagram of the stellar intensity interferometer used to determine the diameter of stars is depicted. Two-beam interferometers are optical devices that divide and then recombine a light beam. It is on recombination of the beams that interference occurs. The most well-known two-beam interferometers are the Sagnac interferometer, the Mach–Zehnder interferometer, and the Michelson interferometer.