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Researchers from the University of Birmingham, UK, have developed an intriguing computer model to understand how light and matter interact. As tasks go, it is exceptionally hard, but the team was able to develop a strategy to simplify the problem. In doing so, they were also able to create something peculiar: an image representing the precise shape of a single photon.
A photon is a particle of light. Light (and matter) exists both as a particle and as a wave. This duality discovery was the solution to millennia of debate, when it became obvious from experiments that light does propagate as a wave but can also be described by distinct packets of energy, which is what we call photons.
The interaction between individual photons and matter is very important in quantum mechanics. It drives a host of different mechanisms – some of them fundamental to many technologies that we interact with every day. Understanding the interaction has been a monumental task. Light propagating through the environment has limitless possibilities for interaction.
The team took this continuous range of possibilities and simplified it by creating a discrete set. They were able to model in this way the interaction between an emitter and a photon, as well as how the photon travels into a distant “far-field”. The calculations were also able to provide a graphical understanding of the shape of a photon.
