Destructive Interference and particle waves... A Question!

[RyanJ]

Destructive Interference and particle waves... A Question!

 

Hi there everyone!

 

I understand that destructive interference has been preformed on thing other than light waves such as electrons and even whole atoms, I understand that destructive interference occurs when the path difference of two waves are not evenly divisible by the wavelength, when this occurs the waves cancel each other out.

 

So my question is this, the waves are nulled, the product is a wave with no amplitude and no wavelength and so there is no wave. What happens to the particles the waves were from? Are they simply lost or does something else happen?

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[m4rc]

If you had a source of light and wanted to elliminate it, you can place another light source near it and cause destructive interference at any arbitrary position. All you would have to do is place it somewhere and make certain that it had the right phase to cancel out the light from the original source. However you can't cause destructive interference everywhere at once. There will always be somewhere where there is constructive interference. That is where the energy goes.

 

The same thing happens for particles. You can't have destructive interference everywhere.

[RyanJ]

The same thing happens for particles. You can't have destructive interference everywhere.

 

I know that

 

My question was: What happens to the particles whose waves have undergone destructive interference' date=' do they simply vanish or does something else happen? Clearly the particles are not there because their waves are not so what happened?

 

[b']*[/b] The particle could be an atom or something larger....

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[Klaynos]

If you send one particle through 2 slits you will never get nothing on the other side, one particle in, one particle out. It is it's position which is caused by the interfearence...

 

If you repeat the experiment with single particles and plot the results you will find an interfearence pattern forms.

[m4rc]

Thinking of the atoms as points is not appropriate in this case. The atom will be spread out in all directions as a wave. This can interfere with a wave from another atom which is also spread out. It is not until atoms are detected (collapse of the wave function) that you can treat them as points again. The probability of detecting the atoms will be larger where there is at a position where the waves interfere constuctively and the probability will be zero where they interfere destructively.

 

The interference will prevent the emission of the atoms in certain directions and enhance the emission in other directions.

[RyanJ]

AH, I understand - it was a mistake in my logic then

 

Thanks all,

 

Ryan Jones