Young's experiment, performed in the early 1800s, played a crucial role in the understanding of the wave theory of light, vanquishing the corpuscular theory of light proposed by Isaac Newton, which had been the accepted model of light propagation in the 17th and 18th centuries.
This type of experiment was first performed, using light, by Thomas Young in 1801, as a demonstration of the wave behavior of light.
Taylor in 1909, by reducing the level of incident light until photon emission/absorption events were mostly non-overlapping. A double-slit experiment was not performed with anything other than light until 1961, when Claus Jönsson of the University of Tübingen performed it with electron beams.
In 1927, Davisson and Germer demonstrated that electrons show the same behavior, which was later extended to atoms and molecules.
Taylor in 1909, by reducing the level of incident light until photon emission/absorption events were mostly non-overlapping. A double-slit experiment was not performed with anything other than light until 1961, when Claus Jönsson of the University of Tübingen performed it with electron beams.
In other words, the experimenters were creating a statistical map of the full trajectory landscape. ===Other variations=== In 1967, Pfleegor and Mandel demonstrated two-source interference using two separate lasers as light sources. It was shown experimentally in 1972 that in a double-slit system where only one slit was open at any time, interference was nonetheless observed provided the path difference was such that the detected photon could have come from either slit.
This which-way experiment illustrates the complementarity principle that photons can behave as either particles or waves, but cannot be observed as both at the same time. Despite the importance of this thought experiment in the history of quantum mechanics (for example, see the discussion on Einstein's version of this experiment), technically feasible realizations of this experiment were not proposed until the 1970s.
In other words, the experimenters were creating a statistical map of the full trajectory landscape. ===Other variations=== In 1967, Pfleegor and Mandel demonstrated two-source interference using two separate lasers as light sources. It was shown experimentally in 1972 that in a double-slit system where only one slit was open at any time, interference was nonetheless observed provided the path difference was such that the detected photon could have come from either slit.
In 1974, the Italian physicists Pier Giorgio Merli, Gian Franco Missiroli, and Giulio Pozzi repeated the experiment using single electrons and biprism (instead of slits), showing that each electron interferes with itself as predicted by quantum theory.
(Naive implementations of the textbook thought experiment are not possible because photons cannot be detected without absorbing the photon.) Currently, multiple experiments have been performed illustrating various aspects of complementarity. An experiment performed in 1987 produced results that demonstrated that information could be obtained regarding which path a particle had taken without destroying the interference altogether.
The experimental conditions were such that the photon density in the system was much less than unity. In 1999, the double-slit experiment was successfully performed with buckyball molecules (each of which comprises 60 carbon atoms).
The largest entities for which the double-slit experiment has been performed were molecules that each comprised 2000 atoms (whose total mass was 25,000 atomic mass units). The double-slit experiment (and its variations) has become a classic for its clarity in expressing the central puzzles of quantum mechanics.
In 2002, the single-electron version of the experiment was voted "the most beautiful experiment" by readers of Physics World. In 2012, Stefano Frabboni and co-workers eventually performed the double-slit experiment with electrons and real slits, following the original scheme proposed by Feynman.
In 2002, the single-electron version of the experiment was voted "the most beautiful experiment" by readers of Physics World. In 2012, Stefano Frabboni and co-workers eventually performed the double-slit experiment with electrons and real slits, following the original scheme proposed by Feynman.
Implementations of the polarizers using entangled photon pairs have no classical explanation. ===Weak measurement=== In a highly publicized experiment in 2012, researchers claimed to have identified the path each particle had taken without any adverse effects at all on the interference pattern generated by the particles.
They sent single electrons onto nanofabricated slits (about 100 nm wide) and, by collecting the transmitted electrons with a single-electron detector, they could show the build-up of a double-slit interference pattern. In 2019, single particle interference was demonstrated for antimatter by Marco Giammarchi and coworkers. ==Variations of the experiment== ===Interference of individual particles=== An important version of this experiment involves single particles.
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