
Simultaneous observation of quantization and interference pattern - lelf
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150302/ncomms7407/full/ncomms7407.html
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AndrewOMartin
With my understanding of "the dual nature of light", a better headline would
be "The first ever photograph of light as neither a particle or wave", i.e. if
it was a wave it wouldn't do this (hold a standing wave) and that (exchange
quanta with electrons) at the same time.

Why do I say "neither" is better than "both"? It makes light seem like
something different, rather than something that spookily is two things
depending on what you're doing.

Feynman seemed to me to argue for just accepting that you're working with
models of things that might not have human-scale analogues, and not to get
caught up with what they "really" are.

~~~
escape_goat
[This comment is from before a link to a poorly titled phys.org article was
changed so that it pointed to the nature paper itself. He is not arguing that
the title of the actual article is a bad title.]

~~~
AndrewOMartin
It's true that I wouldn't have complained if the link originally pointed to
nature.com (rather than originally pointing to phys.org and then being edited
to point to nature.com) but it's also true that I wouldn't have had the time
or ability to work through so much as the abstract, which I find utterly,
utterly impenetrable, even with a non-trivial interest in physics, and make
any comment at all.

In its defense, the phys.org article embedded a video with a much more
accessible explanation of what happened.

Video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlaVHxUSiNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlaVHxUSiNk)

The video is imperfect, there are a number of unnecessary over simplifications
and patronizing sounds and silly faces, but I still found it more informative
than the article.

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hijiri
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'm not sure if I would call this a photograph

~~~
gus_massa
I agree. I think this is a more complex experiment, not a "photography". I'm
not a classification fanatic; I can classify electron microscopy as
"photography", but this is too diferent.

~~~
jschwartzi
They do have some pretty neat pictures of the surface of a sample nanowire
outlined by what they think are SPPs, but calling it a "first ever photo of a
photon as both a wave and a particle" seems like it's stretching things a bit.

From what I understand, they're basically shooting an IR and UV laser pulse
separated by a short(femptosecond) delay at the surface of a nanowire, and
then using the interaction between a beam of electrons passing near the
surface of the wire to gauge surface excitation as a result of the laser
pulses. In theory, the surface electrons enter an excitation state from the
laser pulse and then shortly thereafter exchange their quanta with the
electron beam.

Because light is quantized, the excitation state is reached, but because it is
a field with wave-like characteristics the excitation states in the surface
electrons appear to exhibit a standing-wave pattern.

This is pretty fantastic.

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sctb
We updated the URL from
[http://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html](http://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html),
which points to this.

