Posted: Jun 04, 2011 2:14 am
Calilasseia wrote:Bugger, you beat me to it. I was just about to post this!
This is probably going to involve entangled quantum states between the real photon and a virtual partner.
I'm a bit unsure about this - in what way are the individual Photons 'entangled'? Where does a virtual partner come into play?
As I understand it (Say Wikipedia), virtual particles are extremely constrained in both space and time - either spontaneously (and very, very briefly) appearing as a virtual pair of particles within a static field, or appearing as a virtual mediator between two 'real' particles.
The twin-slit experiment seems to involve distances and times far larger than one would expect for virtual actions/interactions. I'm afraid I just don't 'buy' the notion of a single real Photon approaching a slit, deciding to spontaneously split into two virtual Photons, one going through one slit and the other going through the other slit, and then recombining on the other side to 're-constitute' a real Photon again. My main problem with this, is that the quantum state of the 'before' and 'after' Photon would be the same (Conservation laws), so this scenario resolves nothing.
Having said all this, we still have an interference pattern - even with only single Photons traversing the apparatus at any one time - that seems to need an explanation, or mechanism, of some sort.
As Twistor59 said, it is a shame the paper is behind a pay-wall.
