Thomas Youngs Double Slit Experiment

Throughout the nineteenth century, physicists had a consensus that light behaved like a wave, in large part thanks to the famous double slit experiment performed by Thomas Young. Driven by the insights from the experiment, and the wave properties it demonstrated, a century of physicists sought out the medium through which light was waving, the luminous ether.  Though the experiment is most notable with light, the fact is that this sort of experiment can be performed with any type of wave, such as water. For the moment, however, well focus on the behavior of light. What Was the Experiment? In the early 1800s (1801 to 1805, depending on the source), Thomas Young conducted his experiment. He allowed light to pass through a slit in a barrier so it expanded out in wave fronts from that slit as a light source (under Huygens Principle). That light, in turn, passed through the pair of slits in another barrier (carefully placed the right distance from the original slit). Each slit, in turn, diffracted the light as if they were also individual sources of light. The light impacted an observation screen. This is shown to the right. When a single slit was open, it merely impacted the observation screen with greater intensity at the center and then faded as you moved away from the center. There are two possible results of this experiment: Particle interpretation: If light exists as particles, the intensity of both slits will be the sum of the intensity from the individual slits. Wave interpretation: If light exists as waves, the light waves will have interference under the principle of superposition, creating bands of light (constructive interference) and dark (destructive interference). When the experiment was conducted, the light waves did indeed show these interference patterns. A third image that you can view is a graph of the intensity in terms of position, which matches with the predictions from interference. Impact of Young's Experiment At the time, this seemed to conclusively prove that light traveled in waves, causing a revitalization in Huygens wave theory of light, which included an invisible medium, ether, through which the waves propagated. Several experiments throughout the 1800s, most notably the famed Michelson-Morley experiment, attempted to detect the ether or its effects directly. They all failed and a century later, Einsteins work in the photoelectric effect and relativity resulted in the ether no longer being necessary to explain the behavior of light. Again a particle theory of light took dominance. Expanding the Double Slit Experiment Still, once the photon theory of light came about, saying the light moved only in discrete quanta, the question became how these results were possible. Over the years, physicists have taken this basic experiment and explored it in a number of ways. In the early 1900s, the question remained how light — which was now recognized to travel in particle-like bundles of quantized energy, called photons, thanks to Einsteins explanation of the  photoelectric effect  Ã¢â‚¬â€ could also exhibit the behavior of waves. Certainly, a bunch of water atoms (particles) when acting together form waves. Maybe this was something similar. One Photon at a Time It became possible to have a light source that was set up so that it emitted one photon at a time. This would be, literally, like hurling microscopic ball bearings through the slits. By setting up a screen that was sensitive enough to detect a single photon, you could determine whether there were or were not interference patterns in this case. One way to do this is to have a sensitive film set up and run the experiment over a period of time, then look at the film to see what the pattern of light on the screen is. Just such an experiment was performed and, in fact, it matched Youngs version identically — alternating light and dark bands, seemingly resulting from wave interference. This result both confirms and bewilders the wave theory. In this case, photons are being emitted individually. There is literally no way for wave interference to take place because each photon can only go through a single slit at a time. But the wave interference is observed. How is this possible? Well, the attempt to answer that question has spawned many intriguing interpretations of  quantum physics, from the Copenhagen interpretation to the many-worlds interpretation. It Gets Even Stranger Now assume that you conduct the same experiment, with one change. You place a detector that can tell whether or not the photon passes through a given slit. If we know the photon passes through one slit, then it cannot pass through the other slit to interfere with itself. It turns out that when you add the detector, the bands disappear. You perform the exact same experiment, but only add a simple measurement at an earlier phase, and the result of the experiment changes drastically. Something about the act of measuring which slit is used removed the wave element completely. At this point, the photons acted exactly as wed expect a particle to behave. The very uncertainty in position is related, somehow, to the manifestation of wave effects. More Particles Over the years, the experiment has been conducted in a number of different ways. In 1961, Claus Jonsson performed the experiment with electrons, and it  conformed  with Youngs behavior, creating interference patterns on the observation screen. Jonssons version of the experiment was voted the most beautiful experiment by  Physics World  readers in 2002. In 1974, technology became able to perform the experiment by releasing a single electron at a time. Again, the interference patterns showed up. But when a detector is placed at the slit, the interference once again disappears. The experiment was again performed in 1989 by a Japanese team that was able to use much more refined equipment. The experiment has been performed with photons, electrons, and atoms, and each time the same result becomes obvious — something about measuring the position of the particle at the slit removes the wave behavior. Many theories exist to explain why, but so far much of it is still conjecture.