- #1
greypilgrim
- 517
- 36
Hi.
A beam of previously unpolarized or diagonally polarized doesn't create an interference pattern behind a double slit if there is a vertically and horizontally oriented polarizer behind either slit.
The classical explanation is that the electric field is a vector perpendicular to the direction of the beam and perpendicularly polarized vectors don't add up to an interference pattern.
The (Copenhagen?) quantum explanation is somehow that the mere possibility to find out which way the photon took destroys interference.
This made me wonder why I think I've never seen theories that assume the wave function to be a (three-dimensional) vectorial quantity, like the electric field in the classical case. The Born rule might be formulated with a suitable scalar product.
But I guess there's reasons nobody theorizes about this, maybe somebody could point them out to me.
A beam of previously unpolarized or diagonally polarized doesn't create an interference pattern behind a double slit if there is a vertically and horizontally oriented polarizer behind either slit.
The classical explanation is that the electric field is a vector perpendicular to the direction of the beam and perpendicularly polarized vectors don't add up to an interference pattern.
The (Copenhagen?) quantum explanation is somehow that the mere possibility to find out which way the photon took destroys interference.
This made me wonder why I think I've never seen theories that assume the wave function to be a (three-dimensional) vectorial quantity, like the electric field in the classical case. The Born rule might be formulated with a suitable scalar product.
But I guess there's reasons nobody theorizes about this, maybe somebody could point them out to me.