Can the 'photon interferes only with itself' hypothesis be reconciled with superposition of light from multiple beams or sources?

Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri; Narasimha S. Prasad; Qing Peng

doi:10.1117/12.734363

31 August 2007 Can the 'photon interferes only with itself' hypothesis be reconciled with superposition of light from multiple beams or sources?

Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri, Narasimha S. Prasad, Qing Peng

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 6664, The Nature of Light: What Are Photons?; 66640S (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.734363
Event: Optical Engineering + Applications, 2007, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Any superposition effect as measured (SEM) by us is the summation of simultaneous stimulations experienced by a detector due to the presence of multiple copies of a detectee each carrying different values of the same parameter. We discus the cases with light beams carrying same frequency for both diffraction and multiple beam Fabry-Perot interferometer and also a case where the two superposed light beams carry different frequencies. Our key argument is that if light really consists of indivisible elementary particle, photon, then it cannot by itself create superposition effect since the state vector of an elementary particle cannot carry more than one values of any parameter at the same time. Fortunately, semiclassical model explains all light induced interactions using quantized atoms and classical EM wave packet. Classical physics, with its deeper commitment to Reality Ontology, was better prepared to nurture the emergence of Quantum Mechanics and still can provide guidance to explore nature deeper if we pay careful attention to successful classical formulations like Huygens-Fresnel diffraction integral.

Citation Download Citation

Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri, Narasimha S. Prasad, and Qing Peng "Can the 'photon interferes only with itself' hypothesis be reconciled with superposition of light from multiple beams or sources?", Proc. SPIE 6664, The Nature of Light: What Are Photons?, 66640S (31 August 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.734363

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