All the youtube videos I have seen on the double slit experiment broadly fall into one of the following three categories:
- Documentaries and fan made videos heavy on animation which 'admire' the wave-particle duality of light rather than 'explaining' it.
- University lectures where the professors draw diagrams on the board and go into the mathematics (e.g. how to calculate the distance between two bright bands) but never explain how the actual apparatus is built.
- Double slit DIY videos on how to do the experiment with sunlight or laser but they seem to leave out the most critical part, how do you make the light source so faint that only one photon is emitted at a time?
As far as I understand, the classical wave theory of light fails to explain the interference only when you do the experiment with one photon at a time. My question here is, how do you make the light source fire a single particle of light at a time when you are trying to determine whether or not light is made of particles in the first place? I am more interested in the engineering of the apparatus rather than the mathematical explanation.
A follow up question might be, how can you be sure that indeed only one photon is coming out of the source at a time? (a single photon is hitting the screen at a time is not the same as a single photon is coming out of the source at a time, especially given the weird wave-particle duality).
Answer
I think there's a bit of confusion here. The double-slit experiment was not performed with "single photons" - it's very hard to even consider what that would mean. At its heart, it is a thought experiment, and it's not really possible to make a real-life device that tests it.
The first low-intensity experiment (Taylor 1909) was challenging the EM field interpretation of photons - the idea was that if photons were localised concentrations of the EM field, as you lowered the intensity, there would be no photons to interfere with each other, and the diffraction pattern would disappear. When the experiment was low-intensity enough that Taylor couldn't distinguish between photons emitted and photons absorbed, he noted that the diffraction pattern still exists, so the photons couldn't just be localised concentrations of the EM field. Dirac had a different explanation - he considered that each individual photon was capable of interacting with itself.
Later, the experiments were repeated not with light, but rather, electrons. Electrons are a lot more convenient than photons, since they obey the Pauli principle: it makes a lot more sense to say "an electron here, an electron there". And you can emit individual electrons, which was first tested in 1974, and it was found that individual electrons do in fact display the same interference pattern. Later, it was found that the same pattern also appears for atoms and complex molecules (the current "world record" has the experiment done with a molecule with more than 800 atoms, at ~10 000 atomic weights; the experiment gets much harder with bigger "particles", since it requires much more precision). But we'll stick to electrons, since they're quite convenient.
Emission of individual electrons is still quite tricky, but they have a few important properties. They carry a charge, and they have mass. Both of these can be measured, and while this does disturb the electron (change its trajectory), it doesn't absorb it. Photons, on he other hand, will be absorbed by any measurement, which makes them tricky to deal with.
So you can measure with precision to individual electrons how many electrons were emitted from your emitor, and how many were absorbed on the detection surface. More importantly, you can try experimenting with what happens when you measure the electrons on the way between the emitor and the detector - and that's when real quantum phenomena come in.
Which path does the electron take through the double-slit apparatus? If you're already in the modern quantum physics mindset, the question doesn't really make any sense (and by modern, I still mean the first half of the 20th century :). But as we've seen, electrons can be measured on the way, so what if we put detectors on the two slits? Well, as was of little surprise to the people involved, the pattern disappears completely (this was predicted by Feynmann and others long before the actual experiment was done in 1961). What's more interesting (and still predicted in advance), putting the detectors behind the two slits also destroys the pattern.
But this is really a matter for another question entirely. At the core, the answer to your question is "the full experiment cannot be done with light, and was never attempted with light". The best that was attempted was to reduce the intensity of the incident light so low that the energy corresponded to one photon of a given energy - by adding distance and barriers in the light's path. But we know of no way to emit individual photons, or to detect them with certainty, or to measure their paths - and it may very well be outright impossible, not just infeasible. Now, this in itself is quite enough to discredit the dual theory of light (unless you go with Dirac's assertion), but the real experiment was done with single electrons, and continued with bigger and bigger quantum particles, up to the 800+-atom monster I mentioned earlier.
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