Watching Photons Interfere: “Observing the Average Trajectories of Single Photons in a Two-Slit Interferometer”

It’s been a long and brutally busy week here, so I really ought to just take a day off from blogging. But there’s a new paper in Science on quantum physics that’s just too good to pass up, so here’s a ReasearchBlogging post to close out the week. Aw, c’mon, dude, I’m tired. What’s so… Continue reading Watching Photons Interfere: “Observing the Average Trajectories of Single Photons in a Two-Slit Interferometer”

Interference of Independent Photon Beams: The Pfleegor-Mandel Experiment

Earlier this week, I talked about the technical requirements for taking a picture of an interference pattern from two independent lasers, and mentioned in passing that a 1967 experiment by Pfleegor and Mandel had already shown the interference effect. Their experiment was clever enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging Q&A treatment, though, so here we go:… Continue reading Interference of Independent Photon Beams: The Pfleegor-Mandel Experiment

Quantum Mechanics Is Square: “Ruling Out Multi-Order Interference in Quantum Mechanics”

This week’s big story in physics is this Science paper by a group out of Austria Canada (edited to fix my misreading of the author affiliations), on a triple-slit interference effect. This has drawn both the usual news stories and also some complaining about badly-worded news stories. So, what’s the deal? What did they do… Continue reading Quantum Mechanics Is Square: “Ruling Out Multi-Order Interference in Quantum Mechanics”

Official Neil B Quantum Measurement Thread

I’m a little cranky after a day of reviewing grant proposals, so it’s possible that I’m overreacting. But commenter Neil B has been banging on about quantum measurement for weeks, including not one, not two, but three lengthy comments in Tuesday’s dog post. For that reason, I am declaring this post’s comments section to be… Continue reading Official Neil B Quantum Measurement Thread