Hold onto your lab coats: physicists have just unveiled one of light’s most enduring mysteries by visualizing the shape of a single photon. This breakthrough is detailed in Physical Review Letters with a new way to understand how photons interact with matter and their environment.
Photons, the smallest units of light, are notoriously tricky to pin down. Governed by the principles of wave-particle duality, they can act like particles or waves, depending on how they’re observed. Adding to the complexity, photons are also ripples of discrete energy within an electromagnetic field, interacting with atoms and their surroundings in countless ways.
But now, researchers at the University of Birmingham have devised a way to simplify these interactions. By categorizing photon behaviors into manageable sets, or “pseudomodes,” they’ve developed a practical approach to modeling their elusive shape.
Benjamin Yuen, the study’s lead author, explained, “Our calculations enabled us to convert a seemingly insolvable problem into something that can be computed. And, almost as a byproduct of the model, we were able to produce this image of a photon, something that hasn’t been seen before in physics.”
A major advantage of this new model is its ability to describe how photons transition from the “near field” (close to their source) to the “far field” (a distant electromagnetic region). Previous methods often fell short in linking these regions, leaving gaps in our understanding of light’s behavior.
Yuen emphasized the significance of this breakthrough, stating, “This work helps us to increase our understanding of the energy exchange between light and matter. Lots of this information had previously been thought of as just ‘noise,’ but there’s so much information within it that we can now make sense of, and make use of.”
This deeper understanding of photon interactions has wide-ranging implications. For quantum physicists and material scientists, it could revolutionize nano-optic technology, leading to advancements in solar energy harvesting, quantum computing, and communication systems.