Part I looks at duality for the photon; Part II does the same for the electron. The traditional division of kinetic energy between radiation (E = hf) and matter-in-motion (E = 1/2 mv2) is reexamined permitting new insights into duality. \n \nAn in-flight photon displays wave characteristics. Such a photon can interfere with itself and take all available space paths as a wave. In addition, photons pass through one another like waves whereas particles impact each other. It is only when the photon terminates on a material object and gives up its energy – and ceases to be a photon – that particle characteristics appear, namely: 1) the photon is finally space located; and 2) oscillation ceases. This suggests that the photon’s wave and particle nature do not overlap. Understanding photon termination as a release of mass stored, rather than particle impact, permits a better understanding of presumed wave-particle duality for the photon.
Part I looks at duality for the photon; Part II does the same for the electron. The traditional division of kinetic energy between radiation (E = hf) and matter-in-motion (E = 1/2 mv2) is reexamined permitting new insights into duality. \n \nAn in-flight photon displays wave characteristics. Such a photon can interfere with itself and take all available space paths as a wave. In addition, photons pass through one another like waves whereas particles impact each other. It is only when the photon terminates on a material object and gives up its energy – and ceases to be a photon – that particle characteristics appear, namely: 1) the photon is finally space located; and 2) oscillation ceases. This suggests that the photon’s wave and particle nature do not overlap. Understanding photon termination as a release of mass stored, rather than particle impact, permits a better understanding of presumed wave-particle duality for the photon.
Photons deliver their energy and momentum to a point on a material target. It is commonplace to attribute this to particle impact. But since the in-flight photon also has a wave nature, we are stuck with the paradox of wave-particle duality. It is argued here that the photon’s wave nature is indisputable, but its particle nature is open to question. Photons deliver energy. The problem with invoking impact as a means of delivery is that energy becomes a payload which in turn requires a particle. This assumes that energy is always a payload and there is but one mode of energy delivery; surely two unsupported assumptions. It should be possible to explain photon termination without invoking particle impact. One approach offered here is to question the assumption that the photon is a unitary object. Perhaps the photon has two linked-but-distinct identities: one supporting wave behavior and the other supporting discrete behavior. It is the latter that might imitate particle impact.
Confirmation of the theory under discussion Wave - Particle Duality as Kinetic Energy Against and In Direction of Motion in discussion group Theoretical Physics !!!! Eureka !!!! Light Captures as Both Particle and Wave Sergey V. Efremov @Sergey V., Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you very much .... In a Physics First, Light is Captured as Both Particle and Wave Physicists have theorized for over a century that light acts as both a particle and a wave, depending on the conditions, but they've never been able to capture it being both at once — until a team in Switzerland did just that in a recent experiment. Scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne managed to take a snapshot of light in all its elusive wave-particle duality, a form first proposed by Einstein in 1905. It was no easy task: You need light in order to take pictures of things, but how do you take a picture of light itself? The EPFL team, led by Fabrizio Carbone, started by exposing a tiny metallic nanowire to a pulse of laser light. The light travels up and down this wire and interferes with itself, forming stationary and illustrating that portion of light's dual nature. At the same time, though, those waves are made of innumerable photons. This was shown by barraging the standing waves with electrons — some of which would speed up, and some slow down, depending on how they strike photons in the stream. The simple fact that these quanta of exchanged energy exist proves that there are particles there, not just a simple waveform of radiation (like a magnetic field). The result is the image above, which shows light exhibiting wavelike and particle-like properties at the same time. This research, published in the journal Nature Communications, significantly advances our understanding of how light works on the smallest detectable scales, and may be highly valuable in the field of quantum computing. It is fully in line with Wave - Particle Duality as Kinetic Energy Against and In Direction of Motion. Kinetic energy of a charge moving at the velocity of v has two different values: Kinetic energy against direction of motion as wave in transmission medium (as the energy of the electromagnetic field) Tkin ad = mc2[ln |1+v/c|- (v/c)/(1+v/c)] Kinetic energy in direction of motion as particle (as its own kinetic energy of particle ) Tkin id = mc2[ln |1-v/c|+ (v/c)/(1-v/c)]
Why do photons and speeding electrons have both wave features and particle features when common sense tells us that they should be either particle or wave and not an amalgam of both? Part I of this paper deals with photons and argues that there are flaws in the assumptions we have made regarding their particle nature. The argument depends upon distinguishing between two identities of the photon, namely unstored energy and its stored (relativistic) mass. Part II extends these arguments to the case of the speeding electron and argues that current ontological assumptions made about projectiles have exacerbated our confusion about the nature of moving electrons. When regarded ontologically, projectile motion is not as simple as has been assumed by both classical and modern physics.
The photon is typically regarded as a unitary object that is both particle-discrete and wave-continuous. This is a paradoxical position and we live with it by making dualism a fundamental feature of radiation. It is argued here that the photon is not unitary; rather it has two identities, one supporting discrete behavior and the other supporting continuous (wave) behavior. There is photon kinetic energy that is always discrete/localized on arrival; it never splits (on half-silvered mirrors) or diffracts (in pinholes or slits). Then there is the photon’s probability wavefront that is continuous and diffractable. Acknowledging that the photon has two identities explains the photon’s dual nature. And wave-particle duality is central to quantum mechanics. Understanding it leads to new insights into the photon’s constant velocity and its entanglement with another photon.
How can we construct a picture of the photon from the wealth of observation material available to us? The photon appears to have a split personality: it is neither a wave nor a particle but something else which, depending on the experimental situation, exhibits a wave- or a particle-like behavior. In other words, in the photon (as in material particles such as the electron) the particle–wave dualism becomes manifest. Whereas classically the wave and the particle pictures are separate, quantum mechanics accomplishes a formal synthesis through a unified mathematical treatment. Let us look first at the wave aspect familiar from classical electrodynamics, which seems to be the most natural description. It makes all the different interference phenomena understandable, such as the “interference of the photon with itself” on the one hand and the appearance of spatial and temporal intensity correlations in a thermal radiation field on the other (which are obviously brought about by superposition of elementary waves emitted independently from different atoms). It might come as a surprise (at least for those having quantum mechanical preconceptions) that the classical theory is valid down to arbitrarily small intensities: the visibility of the interference pattern does not deteriorate even for very small intensities – the zero point fluctuations of the electromagnetic field advocated by quantum mechanics do not have a disturbing effect – and is valid not only for conventional interference experiments but also for interference between independently generated light beams (in the form of laser light).
Field-Theoretic Explanation of Wave-Particle Duality—Unification of Particle Locality and the Wave Nature of the Perturbation Field This paper provides a physical explanation of the most central puzzle in quantum mechanics—wave-particle duality—without relying on "probability-amplitude collapse" or "nonlocal entanglement." This theory divides all matter in the universe into Nie-matter entities (massive, Staticity) and Ji-matter entities (massless, Dynamicity), and maintains that quantum objects (electrons, neutrons, etc.) are always localized Nie-matter entity particles. Their "wave behavior" originates from the particle's local perturbation of the Ji-matter field that already fills space during motion—the perturbation propagates in the form of a wave, produces an interference field when passing through the double slits, and the interference field in turn guides the particle's landing position. The particle always passes through only one slit, while the field passes through both slits simultaneously; interference is the behavior of the field, not the behavior of the particle. This mechanism naturally explains double-slit interference, the coexistence of neutron collisions and wave behavior, the disturbance of interference fringes by observation devices, and the variation of interference contrast with source offset and slit spacing. This paper further gives three falsifiable predictions: P6-1 (a decisive distinction between device field-strength disturbance and which-path information disturbance), P6-2A (the disturbance effect varies continuously with field strength), and P6-2B (an argument for the explanatory power of double-slit interference contrast—naturally derived from one mechanism vs. jointly explained by four independent concepts). Compared with mainstream theory, this theory does not need "wavefunction collapse," does not need "nonlocality," and does not need "many worlds"—it only needs to acknowledge: particles are localized, the field fills space, and the motion of particles is guided by the local field gradient.