The distance between the slits should be roughly the same as the light's wavelength so that they will both sit inside that beam of light.īehind that wall, place a screen that can detect and record the light that impacts it.
First, take a source of coherent light, such as a laser beam, that shines in a single wavelength, like purely blue visible light at 460nm, and aim it at a wall with two slits in it. The easiest way to describe the double-slit experiment is by using light. How does the double-slit experiment work? The double-slit experiment is one of the simplest demonstrations of this wave-particle duality as well as a central defining weirdness of quantum mechanics, one that makes the observer an active participant in the fundamental behavior of particles. If you try to define its momentum, you will find that behaves like a wave and you can't know anything definitive about its position beyond the probability that it exists at any given point within that wave.Įssentially, you will measure it as a particle or a wave, and doing so decides what form it will take. If you try to measure a particle's position, you will measure a particle's position, and it will cease to be a wave at all. That last part is important since it will determine how quantum entities will manifest.
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According to this concept, subatomic entities can be described as both waves and particles, and it is up to the observer to decide how to measure them. This gave rise to the concept of wave-particle duality, which is one of the defining features of quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, in 1926, Edwin Schrödinger published his wave theory of quantum mechanics which showed that particles could be described by an equation that defined their waveform that is, it determined that particles were actually waves.
In 1925, Werner Heisenberg presented his mentor, the eminent German physicist Max Born, with a paper to review that showed how the properties of subatomic particles, like position, momentum, and energy, could be measured.īorn saw that these properties could be represented through mathematical matrices, with definite figures and descriptions of individual particles, and this laid the foundation for the matrix description of quantum mechanics. To understand what the double-slit experiment demonstrates, we need to lay out some key ideas from quantum mechanics. What does the double-slit experiment demonstrate? But not only has the double-slit experiment been repeated countless times in physics labs around the world, but it has also even spawned many derivative experiments that further reinforce its ultimate result, that particles can be waves or discrete objects and that it is as if they "know" when you are watching them.
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