{"id":336592,"date":"2018-09-06T11:57:11","date_gmt":"2018-09-06T15:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=336592"},"modified":"2022-11-28T13:58:42","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T18:58:42","slug":"resolving-quantum-weirdness-a-new-look-at-the-duality-of-light-336592","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/resolving-quantum-weirdness-a-new-look-at-the-duality-of-light-336592\/","title":{"rendered":"Wave particle duality of light: Resolving quantum \u2018weirdness\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Wave particle duality, entanglement and complementarity<\/h2>\n<p>A grain of sand is small and hard; a wisp of fog is wavy and nebulous. And we know that fog\u2019s very nature prevents it ever being small and hard like a sand grain, and we\u2019re sure that a sand grain can\u2019t take on the loose wave character of fog.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, for 90 years physicists have known that these incompatibly opposite properties are inherent in all elementary particles \u2013 such as electrons, photons, and mesons \u2013 and any of them can be observed to have either property at any time.<\/p>\n<p>Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, the founder of modern atomic physics, attempted to resolve this existential dilemma of quantum mechanics by a kind of high-level wordsmithing. He invented the principle of complementarity, which simply asserts that, in some experiments, quantum objects will be found to be localized and act like particles, and in different experiments exactly the same quantum object will be spread out and act like a wave.<\/p>\n<p>Now Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ researchers, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.osapublishing.org\/optica\/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-5-8-942&amp;origin=search\">in a paper published in <em>Optica<\/em>,<\/a> say they\u2019ve resolved this weird\u2014a term used by physicists themselves\u2014and inescapable wave-particle duality by discovering the intimate connection between duality and another equally weird feature of quantum mechanics, namely entanglement.<\/p>\n<p>Lead author Xiaofeng Qian, a research associate at the University\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hajim.rochester.edu\/optics\/\">Institute of Optics<\/a>;\u00a0 Nick Vamivakas, associate professor of quantum optics and quantum physics; and Joseph Eberly, the Andrew Carnegie Professor of Physics, conclude that each of the features of quantum weirdness\u2014entanglement and duality\u2014precisely controls the other.<\/p>\n<p>Entanglement is the quantum mechanical behavior of two particles in which neither alone can be described, independent of the description of the other, even when the particles are separated by vast distance. This is the same property that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger employed to explain his famous thought experiment involving a cat, a Geiger counter, and a bit of poison in a sealed box. \u00a0More recently, entanglement has become an essential element in the on-going development of quantum computation and quantum information science.<\/p>\n<p>The Rochester finding grows from a discovery about duality made by William Wootters and Wojciek Zurek, two physics graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, when thinking about a famous optics experiment done by Thomas Young around 1800. Young detected the wave-like features of sunlight coming through two extremely narrow slits in an opaque screen.<\/p>\n<p>In 1979 Wootters and Zurek predicted that both wave-like dispersal and particle-like localization of the light could be measured in the same experiment, but the sum of the measured amounts could not be greater than 1.<\/p>\n<p>The Rochester researchers, however, point out that a Young-type two-slit experiment could also result in both measures being zero, which contradicts Bohr\u2019s principal of complementarity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAccording to the conventional interpretation, that means that neither a particle nor a wave is present, but there is still light detected,\u201d Qian says. \u201cSo, what is that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The missing feature, the Rochester researchers show, is the control of duality by entanglement, in plain sight but overlooked for decades. Their paper contains both a theoretical prediction and an experimental confirmation.<\/p>\n<p>The result is the first full description of complementarity, a missing piece of the quantum weirdness puzzle. By outlining a way to take entanglement into account, along with wave-ness and particle-ness, the Rochester work means that every Young-type experiment involving duality will deliver a measured sum with exactly the value of 1, which satisfies the conditions outlined by Bohr more than nine decades ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For 90 years physicists have known that incompatibly opposite properties are inherent in all elementary particles. Now Rochester researchers say they\u2019ve resolved this weird and inescapable wave-particle duality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":286,"featured_media":336602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[18662,29502,18632,18652,22002,17762,18572,37822],"class_list":["post-336592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sci-tech","tag-department-of-physics-and-astronomy","tag-featured-post-side","tag-hajim-school-of-engineering-and-applied-sciences","tag-institute-of-optics","tag-nick-vamivakas","tag-quantum-science","tag-research-finding","tag-urnano"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Wave particle duality of light: Resolving quantum \u2018weirdness\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ researchers say they\u2019ve resolved the weird and inescapable wave-particle duality while addressing entanglement and complementarity.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/resolving-quantum-weirdness-a-new-look-at-the-duality-of-light-336592\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wave particle duality of light: Resolving quantum \u2018weirdness\u2019\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ researchers say they\u2019ve resolved the weird and inescapable wave-particle duality while addressing entanglement and complementarity.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/resolving-quantum-weirdness-a-new-look-at-the-duality-of-light-336592\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"News Center\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-09-06T15:57:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-11-28T18:58:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/fea-quantum-optics-group.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Bob Marcotte\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Bob Marcotte\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.rochester.edu\\\/newscenter\\\/resolving-quantum-weirdness-a-new-look-at-the-duality-of-light-336592\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.rochester.edu\\\/newscenter\\\/resolving-quantum-weirdness-a-new-look-at-the-duality-of-light-336592\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Bob Marcotte\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.rochester.edu\\\/newscenter\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/e0d8d271cd290d592461fa9cefca013b\"},\"headline\":\"Wave particle duality of light: Resolving quantum \u2018weirdness\u2019\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-09-06T15:57:11+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-11-28T18:58:42+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.rochester.edu\\\/newscenter\\\/resolving-quantum-weirdness-a-new-look-at-the-duality-of-light-336592\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":590,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.rochester.edu\\\/newscenter\\\/resolving-quantum-weirdness-a-new-look-at-the-duality-of-light-336592\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.rochester.edu\\\/newscenter\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2018\\\/09\\\/fea-quantum-optics-group.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Department of Physics and Astronomy\",\"featured-post-side\",\"Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences\",\"Institute of Optics\",\"Nick Vamivakas\",\"quantum science\",\"research finding\",\"URnano\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Science &amp; 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