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This is confusing to me as I thought the simple act of measuring the wave collapsed the wavefunction.
by ShamelessC 2y ago
This is confusing to me as I thought the simple act of measuring the wave collapsed the wavefunction.
- Koshkin 2y agoIndeed, the article is extremely confusing. The wave in wave-particle duality is not the wave (function), one that collapses. For instance, electromagnetic wave is not the same thing as the wave function of the photon.
- gembeMx 2y agoThanks!
- markisus 2y agoThe arxiv has more details. They sparsely populated a dense lattice with particles. Then they turned off the lattice, which allowed all the particles’ wave functions to evolve according to the Schrödinger equation. Then they turned the lattice back on, which constitutes a measurement and collapses the wave functions. Then they took statistics on how far and in which direction each particle traveled and compared those statistics to the ones implied by Schrödinger’s equation.
- kbelder 2y agoSo is this really just a different version of the double-slit experiment, building up a statistical measurement of the waveform by performing many discrete measurements?
- markisus 2y agoIn a way, although the double slit demonstrated self interference. In this experiment, I think the lattice is so sparsely populated that interference effects are negligible and particles move as free wave packets while the lattice is disabled.