I'm new to QM so excuse my naivety. I was watching an online MIT QM course that described the double-slit experiment (with electrons) when it occurred to me that I have a question. In the video, the lecturer just drew a picture of a solid wall with two slits and then showed pictures of the interference patterns generated by shooting a single electron at the slits. Fine enough, the electron interferes itself, which is beautifully explained by the wave function.
However, aren't the atoms in the wall with the slits also described by a wave function? I mean, can we even meaningfully draw a picture of a 'slit' if it is roughly at the scale of an electron? Aren't we supposed to be dealing with a wave function there too? Looks to me the wall with the slits is treated as a 'classical' object (you can touch it, feel it, smell it) while electron is treated as a quantum object. But that simply cannot be the case.
Question: how does the wave function that describes the atoms around the slit 'know' to interact with the wave function of the electron? Does it collapse? The reason I ask this is because when the electron does not make it through the slit, it must have collided with one of the atoms: but wouldn't collision imply that two particles were at the same place at the same time? Doesn't that require wave function collapse? I'm confused ...
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