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In the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton had advocated that light was corpuscular (particulate), but Christiaan Huygens took an opposing wave description. While Newton had favored a particle approach, he was the first to attempt to reconcile both wave and particle theories of light, and the only one in his time to consider both, thereby anticipating modern wave-particle duality.
The quantum system acts as a wave when passing through the double slits, but as a particle when it is detected. This is a typical feature of quantum complementarity: a quantum system acts as a wave in an experiment to measure its wave-like properties, and like a particle in an experiment to measure its particle-like properties.
Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics and quantum chemistry dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons.
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory that describes the behavior of nature at and below the scale of atoms. [2]: 1.1 It is the foundation of all quantum physics, which includes quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science. Quantum mechanics can describe many systems that classical physics cannot.
The pivotal question then, was how to unify Maxwell's wave theory of light with its experimentally observed particle nature. The answer to this question occupied Albert Einstein for the rest of his life, [57] and was solved in quantum electrodynamics and its successor, the Standard Model. (See § Quantum field theory and § As a gauge boson ...
A wave function can be an eigenvector of an observable, in which case it is called an eigenstate, and the associated eigenvalue corresponds to the value of the observable in that eigenstate. More generally, a quantum state will be a linear combination of the eigenstates, known as a quantum superposition.
Optically shaped matter waves Optical manipulation of matter plays a critical role in matter wave optics: "Light waves can act as refractive, reflective, and absorptive structures for matter waves, just as glass interacts with light waves." [72] Laser light momentum transfer can cool matter particles and alter the internal excitation state of ...
In quantum optics, the Jaynes–Cummings model (sometimes abbreviated JCM) is a theoretical model that describes the system of a two-level atom interacting with a quantized mode of an optical cavity (or a bosonic field), with or without the presence of light (in the form of a bath of electromagnetic radiation that can cause spontaneous emission ...