Wave-Particle Duality of Light

Quantum Mechanics. Something that scientists in movies and prestigious universities

investigate, right? Not necessarily! Do this experiment and you’ll be able to see quantum
mechanics in action by exploring the wave-particle duality of light.

Problem: How can we see quantum interference?

Materials:

Laser (be careful not to shine this in anyone’s eyes)

Needle
Tape
Table
White printer paper (cardstock works best)
Dark room
Flat wall

Procedure:

1. Fold and unfold your sheet of printer paper once so that it can stand upright.
2. Poke a tiny hole in your paper with your needle.
3. Stand your printer paper upright on a table that is at least ten feet away from the wall
you will project your laser onto.
4. Use your tape to mount your laser pointer to a stable object, like a heavy book. Place
the mounted laser on the table.
5. Turn your laser on. Adjust the angle of your laser so that it passes through the hole in
your paper and onto the wall. What did you see? Is it what you expected to see?
6. Poke another hole in your paper right next to the first one so that they’re as close
together as possible without creating one larger hole.
7. Adjust your laser so that it now passes through both holes. Observe the shapes created on the wall. What do you see? Was it what you expected to
see?
8. Cover one of the holes with a small piece of paper, leaving the other open. How does the projected image on the wall change?

Results:

You should have seen a blob of light from the laser when it was passing through one hole, and a striped blob of light when it was passing through both
holes. You should have noticed that the stripes disappeared when you covered one of the holes.

Why?

What is happening is that the photons that are passing through the two holes are interfering with each other in much the same way that waves in water do:
making patterns of light like the ripples in a pond. Two different things can happen to waves during interference: waves that are in-phase with each other
(happening at the same time) add together to become stronger and waves that are out of phase cancel each other out and become weaker. The reason
you saw a striped blob of light when the laser passed through two holes is because of constructive interference—spots where the waves added together
to become stronger.

This is weird because there is ample evidence that points to light being made up of small particles. It doesn’t make sense for particles to interfere with
each other—this would be like baseballs caring about whether they pass through holes that are near each other! The only logical conclusion is that light is
both a particle and a wave. The individual photons (light particles) coming from the laser act as waves as they travel through the two holes—that is, they
interfere with each other before finally hitting the wall.

Another experiment was designed to test this theory. Scientists created a source of light that only let out one photon at a time. They aimed this at a
sensitive detector and left it on for a few days. The detector only saw individual photons strike it: one photon here, another there. But after they stopped
the experiment and looked at the data, they saw the same interference that you’re seeing with the laser! Individual photons were able to travel through
both holes at once. When the scientists repeated this with electrons, tiny particles that make up parts of atoms, they saw the same thing. From this, they
concluded that all matter is simultaneously a particle and a wave, but when it comes to relatively heavy things like electrons, the particle behavior is a lot
easier to observe than the wave behavior.

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