Duality Definition and 282 Threads

Hi, please excuse what is probably a very basic question. I'm abit confused about some of the things I've read about quantum mechanics (can you blame me?). The main thing I'm trying to understand is the reality of duality and superposition. I've heard it said that these concepts are merely...

Please, can someone explain how uncertainity principle explains the wave-particle duality nature of matter and radiation.

After completing a course in Quantum Mechanics and feeling rather dissatisfied with my physical understanding of the theory, I turned to Introductory Quantum Mechanics by Liboff, as I was advised that it was a much more clear treatment. I have barely started reading it and I am already immensely...

I placed it in here because it does have to do with homework, though it is not a numerical problem. The Problem I have to do an Extended Essay in Physics and Quantum mechanics really interest me. What I was planning on doing was doing an experiment with the Wave-Particle Duality experiment...

What is Alexander-Whitney duality?

if matter in QM is considered to be more like waves with that particle duality what happens when a force is applied in QM, is it like classical where the force is a vector or does that change also in QM.

I have three points: 1. According to wave-particle duality, even regular matter can be classified as a wave instead of a particle, for example, an electron or a neutron. My question is, what is this a wave of? A photon is a wave of oscillating electric and magnetic fields. Are electrons, say...

Hi, I have a rather conceptual question about the exact duality between passive and active transformations in general relativity in order to fully understand the concept of diffeomorphism invariance ( I've read most of the topics about this subject here on PF ). I found an article about this by...

Hi, A friend and I have been having a long standing debate on the nature of light, being an uneducated layman I tend to stick to the conventional interpretation of wave-particle duality but my friend maintains that light is solely a wave. He found this link at [link to crackpot website...

hello members of www.physicsforums.com ! primarily i want to apologize for the double thread post; i posted another thread at this link: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1950906#post1950906 and i am afraid it was homework and i did not see the homework section so please forgive...

Ok, I doubt anyone on here will know this, but given a neutral tannakain category there is a bijection between this category and the representations of some group (with some adjectives). I'm not sure how to show that, don't care though. But, to recover the group from the category of...

so does quantum mechanics state that all particles can be represented by waves and that it is needed to do so in order to describe some of the crazy things observed at the atomic and subatomic level.

Hello everyone. I've been reading the forums for a while so decided to register hoping to increase my learning curve in my physics and mathematics classes. I started back to college last year after a 5 year break since I had quit college. I was previously a music education major, so when I...

Sometimes light exists in the form of a wave and sometimes light exists in the form of a particle or wave/particle duality. Light existing in two completely different forms does not make sense to me but the experiments have proved this right? I have a theory that light is actually a stream of...

I'm having problems understanding Hodge duality in its most basic form. It relates exterior p forms to exterior n-p forms where n is the dimensionality of the manifold. I can't seem to follow the discussion on the hodge dual operator on this lecture course (page 19)...

Hi everyone, Thanks in advance for any insights you might be able to lead me to. The photoelectric effect is a well known phenomenon where an incident photon of some energy can stimulate the emission of an electron when absorbed, so long as the energy of the photon can promote an electron...

I know It is not EM wave. It is not probablity wave since probablity can never be negative. But I think De Broglie's wave length for particles (like electron) is derived using equation of mass-energy equivalence. It infers that this wave carries energy ;for this wave-length is same as...

Photons are always called 'particles'. But through many experiments (by scientists such as Geoffrey Taylor), it has been found that photons show some strange characteristics which resemble those of waves. In fact scientists also reveal that electrons also show wave-like nature(in fact they have...

Electrons are said to exhibit wave-particle duality because depending on the method of observation it acts as either a particle or wave. But according to De Broglie waves: A particle of mass,m, moving with velocity,v, acts like a wave of wavelength,\lambda. Where \lambda = \frac{h}{mv}. But...

Demystifier has a paper available entitled "Quantum mechanics: myths and facts". http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0609163 This is a fine overview of a lot of stuff which I would like to understand better. Please join me in discussing. There are 9 myth categories. By myth the author means...

I had a thought about this earlier, and it seems to make sense to me right now but maybe someone else has some input. The idea is basically that wherever there is perception, there is a duality. Perception can be any sensory input also. How are we to examine the thoughts of a person, the...

One of the biggest conundrums is the wave/particle duality of quantum systems as it is observed in two-slit experiments. The interference pattern seen in a two-slit experiment suggests that the quantum system is a wave. But what exactly makes us say that the quantum system also behaves like a...

I had many unsuccessful attempt to prove De Morgan duality law, for the application in electrical enginnering. Is there anyone who can help me about this?

Has anyone read http://www.hotquanta.com/wpd.html" . do any of you think he is on to something>

I've posted similar questions on a different forum previously, but since I'm feeling a bit guilty about going on at the one person there who answers, I'll post these here. Hope it's ok if I don't follow the template since they're more conceptual than a standard problem. Any help appreciated...

I'm getting confused with the idea of probability(Schrodinger) waves and photons. Is the wave side of a photon a probability wave or an electromagnetic wave or both? In the 2 slit experiment with 1 photon at a time, it seems like a photon is described by a probability wave with a probability of...

Hi to all I have a few confusions regarding wave-particle duality. I hope I will get good answers. You need not answer all the questions ( just those that you feel like answering). 1. Light acts as particles called photons. Photons have a definite energy based on their...

I can't quite seem to understand wave particle duality. Every particle has a characteristic wavelength according to de Broglie. Is this the wavelength for the solution to the schrodinger equation for that particle? Take light for example, the wavelength of light corresponds the the wavelength of...

I've been racking my brain to no end trying to feed my crack physics fix. I've even managed to abandon sleep and school work to indulge in this addiction. :-p Anyways Am I looking at this right? I just want some sort of guidance so I'm going in the right direction with this... When a...

using -Wave particle duality- find the wavelength of a bullet, explain. :confused:

Two new papers on beautiful experiments were published this month concerning the Wave Particle duality of the photon:Paradox in Wave-Particle Duality S.Afshar et. Al. in Foundations of Physics. http://www.springerlink.com/content/q110r82074w03277/fulltext.pdf Experimental realization of...

In the 1999 paper published in Nature by Markus Arndt et al entitled "Wave-particle duality of C60 molecules" he states: The fullerenes are of course in this funny state of superposition as they are 'falling'. Couple questions: 1. Is this drop of 0.7 mm identical to what any object...

Hey, I know this is probably a basic question but I've always been more into biology and only got into physics in the past 2 or 3 months. I'm having touble understanding the relationship between particle/wave duality of an electron and its jump from one state to another. how does this...

I just learned formally about wave particle duality in the class today. wave length = plank's constant/momentum my teacher said that every moving object has a wave properties with wave length as described. So a baseball flying in a game would have a wave length of about 10^-30. Is it true...

Does any theory explain all these dualities: Wave/Particle Duality, Space/Time Duality, and Energy/Mass Duality. Does ST or LQG account for all these dualities? What I mean is, can ST or LQG show that these dualities are unified by some deeper physical model? Can any theory show that...

Particle-Wave duality and Hamilton-Jacobi equation According to Particle-Wave duality, an observer can't describe a natural object just from its particle-nature or wave-nature, because a particle is always accompanied by a wave and vice versa. This reminded me some interesting aspects of the...

I don't get how the uncertainty principle is a direct consequence of wave-particle duality?

I'm wondering what would happen if you have light (let's say UV) passing through a double slit. That would make an interference pattern right? How would the photo-electic apparatus respond when palced in the peaks and valleys of the interference pattern?

Brace yourself for another banal question, but... All the explanations I've read that introduce the wave/particle duality start by saying it has to be wave (the light-slit interference experiment) and that light arrives in discrete quantums (the photo electric effect, etc). None of the...

The classic picture of light is as an electromagnetic wave. In textbooks you get the nice pictures of eletric and magnetic field vectors bound together at right angles, oscillating on into the distance. However, this is a very one dimensional picture. The electric and magnetic fields would...

1. I've read somewhere that to derive deBroglie's duality equation L = h / p, where L is wavelength in nm, h is Planck's constant and p is momentum, it's possible mathematically to equate Planck's E=hf with Einstein's E=mc^2, but how to explain it in theory? I mean the m in E=mc^2 is rest-mass...

There seems to be a need for a theory that explains both the particle and wave properties of the electron. Neils Bohr treated the proton and electron as point-charges and successfully calculated the energy levels. He attempted to explain the stability of the h-atom by suggesting the planetary...

Griffiths says the superposition principle is not valid for electrostatic energy.I understood this concept,remembering that energy,unlike potential(point function),is a field function.Is Griffiths's conclusion still correct for point charge distribution (rqn.2.43)...

Would this be a good idea for a research project, i.e as it has controversey in it, photoelectric effect verses Youngs double slit. im doing A-level, and this is a piece of coursework. thank you!

hey guys i was wondering if you knew any thing that helped to prove the wave-particle duality theory of light. any help would be greatly appreciated:smile:

I have a question about an expirement that i saw yesturday in my physics class. They were shooting electrons one at a time at a wall on a video. They watched it and it showed a wave pattern on the sheet and it said that even when one electron goes throught it still goes through both slits and so...

When we observe electromagnetic waves going through that wall-like construction (with two holes in it) of that famous experiment, whose name I unfortunately don't know in English, we observe a particle-like behavior. Many people call that a fundamental phenomenon of quantum physics. But isn't it...

I would like to prove that \ell^{\infty}, namely the Banach space whose elements are sequences of complex numbers that have a fininte infinity-norm (a.k.a. the supremum-norm,) that is for \alpha = \left\{ \alpha_k \right\}_{k=1}^{\infty},[/tex] \ell^{\infty}=\left\{\alpha : \sup\left\{...

i've been learning at college about wave partile duality, how some phenomena can only be explained using the wave theory, but for some background reading i decided to read QED and in the introduction feynman says light behaves like particles. can anyone enlighten me?

Why is the WF of the photon a physical wave - the EM wave, but the WF of all other matter are imaginary?