Pose for your picture

 

Here is the shape of the photon that comes out of the calculations. Image credit: Benjamin Yuen

From analog to digital depending on whether the photon is moving in space as a wave or interacting with an electron as a particle, the ability to see what this boson actually looks like remained but a dream until now.

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.

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.

Light as a wave. | analog 

Thomas Young's double-slit experiment in 1801 showed that light can act as a wave, helping to invalidate early particle theories of light.[26]: 964 

In 1900, Maxwell's theoretical model of light as oscillating electric and magnetic fields seemed complete. However, several observations could not be explained by any wave model of electromagnetic radiation, leading to the idea that light-energy was packaged into quanta described by E = hν. Later experiments showed that these light-quanta also carry momentum and, thus, can be considered particles: The photon concept was born, leading to a deeper understanding of the electric and magnetic fields themselves.

Light as a particle. | digital

Photoemission of electrons from a metal plate accompanied by the absorption of light quanta – photons

Light is indeed weird but so is reality. :)

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut