Quote:
Originally Posted by Len Moran
I would suppose the uncertainty principle would not allow us to get a detectable hit every time, but given a sufficiently densely packed arrangement of detector elements and if we triggered the source enough times, presumably we would get at least one photon properly striking one detector element and thus allowing us to make the correlation.
|
The uncertainty principle doesn't limit the detection
rate so much as the detection
time. What you are talking about is certainly possible, but check out the recent thread about the "amplitude of a photon", where I pointed out that "real photons" are not plane waves but rather wavepackets, which means they have a bandwidth in frequency. It is only that bandwidth that allows the observation you are describing-- you can measure the emission and arrival times of a photon only to within the time uncertainty of the reciprocal of the frequency bandwidth. So get a long enough distance and "sloppy" enough photons, and yes, you can do it. Typically the bandwidth of a photon from a low-density atom is about a hundred million inverse seconds, so you need a travel time much longer than 10^-8 seconds, or a distance much longer than 3 meters, to make what you are saying feasible.
Quote:
|
So presumably such a goal is considered to be a possibility even if it has not yet been achieved.
|
Single-photon emission and detection has been achieved, and used to show that double-slit diffraction still occurs.
Quote:
|
However, is it truly possible to produce one photon on demand with a consistent correlation between the trigger and the actual emission of the photon?
|
If you can accept an uncertainty of that inverse bandwidth, yes.