30/11/2024
Researchers capture first ever image of a PHOTON 🔆, accidentally..😅
“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.”
Dr Benjamin Yuen, School of Physics & Astronomy
Research at the University of Birmingham, published in Physical Review Letters, explores the nature of photons (individual particles of light) in unprecedented detail to show how they are emitted by atoms or molecules and shaped by their environment.
The nature of this interaction leads to infinite possibilities for light to exist and propagate, or travel, through its surrounding environment. This limitless possibility, however, makes the interactions exceptionally hard to model, and is a challenge that quantum physicists have been working to address for several decades.
By grouping these possibilities into distinct sets, the Birmingham team were able to produce a model that describes not only the interactions between the photon and the emitter, but also how the energy from that interaction travels into the distant ‘far field’.
At the same time, they were able to use their calculations to produce a visualisation of the photon itself.
Credit: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2024/new-theory-reveals-the-shape-of-a-single-photon
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