Dividing Light by speed switching

[YT2095]

just going through some of my old junk and I came across an old beam spreader, and that gave me an idea, could Light be switched at speeds exceeding c to get at single photons or a simple "Flat Packet" of light?

 

the idea goes like this, this beam spreader is basicly a hexagonal metal mirror that spins at several Thousand RPM (it actualy Whistles), and so when a laser is shone onto this mirror the beam then gets spread into a line nearly at a 180 (you`de see a line across your wall).

now in Slow motion if your on that line looking at the mirror you`de see a series of single flashes as if the laser were pointing directly at you for a moment.

imagine that happens 1000 times a second.

now along this line at a 90 degree angle you have Another spining mirror at the same rate, you`de get bursts of light from that one at 1000x1000`th of a second and so on with more mirrors, until eventualy there would be very little light actualy being reflected, if this "Switching" were to exceed the rate of visible light, could it be used to examine idividual photons or clusters of them like taking a nm slice of a light beam?

[swansont]

You have to appreciate how many photons you are discussing - a 1 mW source of visible light will have somewhere around 10¹⁵ photons/sec. But yes, were you to cascade enough of these, you'd eventually get down to single photons. However, it's far more practical to use a couple of good crossed-polarizers and/or neutral density filters.

[DV8 2XL]

In the end you run up against the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem if you attempt to do this. Ultimately the faster the sampling rate the more smeared out the resultant signal gets.

[YT2095]

In the end you run up against the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem if you attempt to do this. Ultimately the faster the sampling rate the more smeared out the resultant signal gets.

 

and that means what, in plain English laymans terms ?

[swansont]

here is the wiki entry. Basically, if you want to measure a e.g. 50 Hz signal, you have to sample at much higher (minimum of 2x) than 50 Hz. I don't see how it applies in this case, which is a variation of "can you be far enough away from a point source of light so that you detect individual photons"

[DV8 2XL]

The more you chop-up the signal the more you spread out its bandwidth. That is why fast digital signals must use broadband channels.

 

You propose: "...if this "Switching" were to exceed the rate of visible light, could it be used to examine individual photons or clusters of them like taking a nm slice of a light beam?"

 

Unfortunately the answer is no, because as the switching speed increases the clusters of photons will tend to spread out.

 

This assumes I am interpreting your intentions here the way you intend,

[YT2095]

I THINK I`m with you here, a bit like a CD uses 44khz yet we only hear upto 20k(ish) etc...

so effectively you`de need quite an array of these spreaders to make it viable then?

[DV8 2XL]

That's right. Then think of getting them all synced up! In the end you are better off using a fast optical gate.