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DevilsAvocado said:Oh yeah! Ever heard of the LHC and electromagnetic acceleratation??
No no no, of course you are right... I don’t know what I was thinking on... too fast, too enthusiastic... ()
There’s always 'something' with this darned experiment, isn’t it??
Without knowing anything about it, I can almost guarantee you that it will be impossible to time photons thru the slits – without disturbing them to 'non-interference pattern'. And I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around with electrons, no problem with timing – but then you don’t have any support from Einstein’s c ...
This is nuts!
I can’t say for sure, but shouldn’t you be able to 'surpass' HUP by scaling up the whole experiment to a size where this doesn’t matter – ie if your resolution is 1 second/meter, you drive 1000 meters and that 'resolution' will be sufficient. I think...
But as you pointed out - it won’t work with electrons anyway...
Many thanks for the help!
I am not so sure the timing is the issue. I wonder if the following might actually work. Take a metal-double slit and super-cool it. Then measure the inductance-current in the *entire* double slit apparatus from the electrons (ions would work too), passing through it, and define the peak of the inductance current as t=0. In principle, there should be no "which-path" information from such a measurement.
I wonder what would be observed at the detection screen? My guess is that you would still see interference, even though you have nominal timing information. This is because the induction will couple the momentum of the electrons in the experiment to those in the conduction band of the metal screen, so although you will have timing information, you won't be able to use that to determine which slit the electron went through.
On the other hand, if you are clever, it might be possible to get which path information from the current measurements. If you connect wires to either side of the super cooled double slit, and measure the current at both ends, there should be a timing difference depending on which slit the electron passes through .. i.e. the response pulse should arrive slightly earlier at whichever side corresponds to the slit the electron passed through. I know this timing-based detection works in principle .. it is used to image electron distributions in photo-ionization and photo-detachment experiments. What I don't know is whether the temporal resolution is sufficient to discriminate between the closely spaced slits in the double slit experiment.
Anyway, for the purposes of a gedanken experiment ... I think it *is* possible to discriminate the timing. Can anyone figure out why measuring the current in the timing-sensitive method I mentioned above would destroy the interference pattern?