Stochastic Optics: Wave-Particle Duality without Particles

Brigitte Falkenburg

Mingshan Ye

Different schools have different explanations for the wave-particle duality of microscopic particles. Hidden variable interpretation, pilot wave interpretation, stochastic processes interpretation and so on all think that the generation of wave-particle duality has deeper reasons. According to these interpretations, macroscopic objects can also exhibit significant wave-particle duality. The authors performed a round-hole diffraction experiment of powder particles: some powder particles of the same mass and shape are freely dropped to a plane one by one through a circular hole. At first, the powder particles are distributed disorderly on the plate in the box. With the increase of the number of falling powder particles, a diffraction pattern composed of several concentric rings is gradually presented. This implies that wave-particle duality is not unique to microscopic particles, and it is also exhibited by macroscopic objects. The experimental results help to reveal the nature of wave-particle duality.

Trevor W. Marshall, Emilio Santos

Rudolph Elliot Willis

Wave-particle duality remains one of the most striking and conceptually unresolved features of quantum mechanics. Here I present a dynamical mechanism for wave-particle duality based on spontaneous stochastic mass-energy interconversion at subatomic scales. By promoting particle mass to a fluctuating quantity consistent with Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, I derive a Schrödinger equation with an additional stochastic kinetic-phase term. Applied to the canonical double-slit experiment, the framework shows that quantum interference arises from coherent, path-dependent phase accumulation driven by mass-energy fluctuations, while particle-like localization emerges naturally at detection. The formalism yields closed-form expressions for interference visibility, predicts a momentum- and mass-dependent decoherence rate, admits a path-integral interpretation, and enables direct experimental bounds using neutron, electron, and atom interferometry. The results provide a physically grounded account of wave-particle duality without modifying the axioms of quantum mechanics.

B. Shore

Cesar A. Díaz Hernández

The wave-particle duality is one of the most mysterious phenomena of the quantum theory, in this paper first it's studied the rise of the wave properties of matter from the theory of stochastic electrodynamics (SED), in which de Broglie's idea of a guiding wave that follows the particle and determine its trajectory is taken back. In the frame of the theory (SED) this wave is of electromagnetic character and is a traveling wave that propagates within the zero point field (ZPF) which according the SED is a classic electromagnetic field that permeates all universe. The wave rise from the interaction between the background field and the particle that moves with certain velocity. Then, I expose the results of numerical simulations in which the behavior of the ZPF in a two slit diffraction experiment is calculated and a series of macroscopic experiments that shows behaviors similar to the ones described by the SED. Both, simulations and experiments give us a better physical understanding of the guiding wave and of the wave properties of quantum particles