Posted: Sep 16, 2011 8:05 am
zaybu wrote:twistor59 wrote:
Did you read what I wrote above in the first post of this thread ? You get exactly the same discrete behaviour (flashes building up the interference pattern) if you treat the incident field as purely classical ! The flashes do not provide a proof of the quantum nature of the electromagnetic field - however other things do provide such proof.
I disagree. The graininess demonstrates that releasing one photon at a time shows their particle nature. No wave model can explain that.
That is a common misconception. The analysis provided in Mandel and Wolf demonstrates that the discrete flashes with Poisson statistics can be derived by treating the atoms in the detector quantum mechanically, but the incident EM wave classically. Very surprising, I only realised this relatively recently, but the photoelectric effect does not provide proof of the the quantum nature of light. Photon antibunching is probably the best demonstration of this quantum nature.