• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Shape Of A Single Photon Revealed For First Time Thanks To New Computer Model

November 19, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Researchers from the University of Birmingham, UK, have developed an intriguing computer model to understand how light and matter interact. As tasks go, it is exceptionally hard, but the team was able to develop a strategy to simplify the problem. In doing so, they were also able to create something peculiar: an image representing the precise shape of a single photon.

A photon is a particle of light. Light (and matter) exists both as a particle and as a wave. This duality discovery was the solution to millennia of debate, when it became obvious from experiments that light does propagate as a wave but can also be described by distinct packets of energy, which is what we call photons.

Advertisement

The interaction between individual photons and matter is very important in quantum mechanics. It drives a host of different mechanisms – some of them fundamental to many technologies that we interact with every day. Understanding the interaction has been a monumental task. Light propagating through the environment has limitless possibilities for interaction.

The team took this continuous range of possibilities and simplified it by creating a discrete set. They were able to model in this way the interaction between an emitter and a photon, as well as how the photon travels into a distant “far-field”. The calculations were also able to provide a graphical understanding of the shape of a photon.

“Our calculations enabled us to convert a seemingly insolvable problem into something that can be computed. And, almost as a bi-product of the model, we were able to produce this image of a photon, something that hasn’t been seen before in physics,” first author Dr Benjamin Yuen said in a statement.

This theoretical work has applications in several fields, from physics to materials science. Technologies that require interactions between light and matter, from telecommunications to medical devices via chemical reaction control at a molecular level, can benefit from knowing how these take place.

Advertisement

“The geometry and optical properties of the environment has profound consequences for how photons are emitted, including defining the photons shape, colour, and even how likely it is to exist,” co-author Professor Angela Demetriadou explained.

 “This work helps us to increase our understanding of the energy exchange between light and matter, and secondly to better understand how light radiates into its nearby and distant surroundings. Lots of this information had previously been thought of as just ‘noise’ – but there’s so much information within it that we can now make sense of, and make use of. By understanding this, we set the foundations to be able to engineer light-matter interactions for future applications, such as better sensors, improved photovoltaic energy cells, or quantum computing,” Dr Yuen concluded.

The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China Evergrande shares slide 6% in early trade
  2. Indonesia’s new carbon tax signals higher power costs amid calls for clarity
  3. How Mysterious Space Waves Cross The Turbulent “Shock” To Affect Earth
  4. The World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm Is Looking To Grow Even Further

Source Link: Shape Of A Single Photon Revealed For First Time Thanks To New Computer Model

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • The Bizarre 1997 Experiment That Made A Frog Levitate
  • There’s A Very Good Reason Why October 1582 On Your Phone Is Missing 10 Days
  • Skynet-1A: Military Spacecraft Launched 56 Years Ago Has Been Moved By Persons Unknown
  • There’s A Simple Solution To Helping Avoid Erectile Dysfunction (But You’re Not Going To Like It)
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS May Be 10 Billion Years Old, This Rare Spider Is Half-Female, Half-Male Split Down The Middle, And Much More This Week
  • Why Do Trains Not Have Seatbelts? It’s Probably Not What You Think
  • World’s Driest Hot Desert Just Burst Into A Rare And Fleeting Desert Bloom
  • Theoretical Dark Matter Infernos Could Melt The Earth’s Core, Turning It Liquid
  • North America’s Largest Mammal Once Numbered 60 Million – Then Humans Nearly Drove It To Extinction
  • North America’s Largest Ever Land Animal Was A 21-Meter-Long Titan
  • A Two-Headed Fossil, 50/50 Spider, And World-First Butt Drag
  • Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Is Losing Buckets Of Water Every Second – And It’s Got Cyanide
  • “A Historic Shift”: Renewables Generated More Power Than Coal Globally For First Time
  • The World’s Oldest Known Snake In Captivity Became A Mom At 62 – No Dad Required
  • Biggest Ocean Current On Earth Is Set To Shift, Spelling Huge Changes For Ecosystems
  • Why Are The Continents All Bunched Up On One Side Of The Planet?
  • Why Can’t We Reach Absolute Zero?
  • “We Were Onto Something”: Highest Resolution Radio Arc Shows The Lowest Mass Dark Object Yet
  • How Headsets Made For Cyclists Are Giving Hearing And Hope To Kids With Glue Ear
  • It Was Thought Only One Mammal On Earth Had Iridescent Fur – Turns Out There’s More
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version