I Have Seen the Light

At Earth.com, Precise shape of a single photon revealed for the first time

For the first time, researchers have defined the precise shape of a single photon, a huge leap forward in quantum physics and material science.

Dr. Benjamin Yuen from the University of Birmingham led the groundbreaking research that delves deep into the quantum level of light and matter interaction.

His team’s findings, published in Physical Review Letters, provide a visual representation of a photon while enhancing our understanding of how photons are emitted and shaped by their environment.

The interaction between photons and their environment leads to endless possibilities for how light exists and travels.

This limitless potential makes modeling these interactions exceptionally challenging — a puzzle that quantum physicists have been trying to solve for decades.

“Our calculations enabled us to convert a seemingly unsolvable problem into something that can be computed,” Dr. Yuen explained.

“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.”

The idea of constructing an image of a particle that represents the absolute smallest element of an image seemed a bit grandiose, so I did something dangerous. I went off to the original paper to check. The math was far above my recollections from P-Chem, but I did not find a picture of a photon there. I did, however, see something akin to the picture above, which seems to be a representation of the probable energy distribution within a particular photon. I presume that changes depending on the energy (wavelength) of that photon, and seeing that represented would have been interesting. But I guess they have to save that for the next paper.