Investigating Electron Emission

[Sparky]

Is there an experiment that compares photon emission from one or just a few electrons, as to the photon's direction of travel from the electron?. It would answer the question of photon wave vs particle.

I visualize a sphere that is covered in detectors. Through the center of the sphere a stream of electrons is projected. I say stream because I don't know if one or a few can be isolated and projected. Intercepting this electron stream, is a laser pulse, hopefully only contacting one or a very few electrons at each pulse.

The detectors about the sphere would detect any photons emitted and compare their arrival times. If arrival times are the same and many, could it be said that the photon is a wave. If isolated detection is found, then photons are particles. Would this work? Is it technically possible? Is there a simpler way? Has it been done?

thank you.......

[jjohnson]

Sparky, regarding photon emission by electrons, read up on synchrotron radiation, as one possible starting point — Swinburne Astronomy Online, or Wikipedia, or HyperPhysics.

If you can handle a long and fairly technical PDF, find it here.

A lay discussion is found on this forum.

Electrons spiraling around magnetic guiding centers or having their velocity changed (reduced or increased) in an electric field are all being accelerated. Accelerating electrons will radiate at a frequency proportional to their energy, and if they are relativistic - moving fairly close to the speed of light, their radiation pattern narrows down to a cone pointing approximately forward of their drift direction - i.e., aimed ahead of them like a narrow headlight.

I can't tell you if your experiment would work or provide you with the answer to your particle vs. wave question, but it has been fairly easy to control the emission of electrons ever since the invention of the vacuum tube, and certainly in accelerators, although ions seem to be used there more often than electrons since collisions are usually the method of choice in many experiments, and ions are much heavier than electrons. I don't know if a laser will excite an electron to emit photons or not, but how do you differentiate among photons being sensed by your detectors as being from the laser or the beam of electrons? Laser light is used to "pump" or add energy to already fast-moving charged particles in some types of experiments. Also, electrons colliding with interior surfaces of your sphere will also produce showers of radiation ("light") in the type of radiation called Brehmsstrahlung, which is German for "braking radiation". Sudden deceleration is this type of mechanism.

Good luck with this.

Jim

[Sparky]

electrons colliding with interior surfaces of your sphere will also produce showers of radiation ("light")

thanks......sounds like it would be a difficult experiment to set up.

their radiation pattern narrows down to a cone pointing approximately forward of their drift direction - i.e., aimed ahead of them like a narrow headlight.

well, that is pretty much all i need to know, that it is directional.

[jjohnson]

If that's all you need to know, then, what do you conclude from that? Waves or particles?

[Sparky]

That would tend to support particles, but not definitively. There may be a reason that they emit forwardly in that environment.

Maybe there is some more experimental data that would support or refute particle vs wave photons. I read Miles Mathis criticism of a wave supporting experiment, and his reasoning sounded good.

It is a difficult environment to control and measure in.

thanks

[jjohnson]

Miles's approach is highly mechanical, and still highly theoretical. It's always good to read how others attack problems like the ones you come up against, in photon and other physics type experiments. The more one reads, the wider your base of resources, and the less likely you are to unknowingly follow the same screw-up path that someone else already has. That's a nice timesaver right there.

FYI, there are mechanisms in both acoustical design of loudspeakers and loudspeaker arrays, and radar, which use waveguide shapes called "horns" and phased arrays that result in narrow beamwidths, concentrating energy along a relatively narrow axis. For that reason, 3-D images or tables of intensity around the source are often used to characterize the beaming angles in the far field, very useful to designers who use these things. That the product is a narrow beam has nothing to do with whether the emitter is emitting particles (as loudspeakers do) in a longitudinal wave, or E/M radiation (whether particles or transverse E/M waves).

My tentative conclusion is that anyone would be very hard pressed to design an experiment that could conclusively determine which form "light" really is (in case it is not "both"). Miles, of course, is in the collision crowd, and does not cotton to fields at all. Being titled Physics, it's all -well, physical, to him. I see his point. (Read his paper on the double slit experiment. He proposes an interesting counter experiment at the end of that paper which I wish some lab would try.) I also like the idea of fields and action at a distance and an aether, but cannot get my head around how those physically would work at the tiniest, most fundamental level. Don't forget, there are photon emitters that emit a single photon at a time, somehow, at a user-determined rate of fire. Are those chunks of light, or little bundles of something vibrating at a particular frequency, or what?

Can a photon vibrate or contain vibrations at more than a single frequency simultaneously? Sound waves can. A complex sound wave can be broken down into the frequencies present in its waveform by using Fourier transform analysis as well as wavelet analysis. So can a complexly colored source of light, I'd bet; waves are waves, although the differences between transverse and longitudinal waves intransmission media as different as air and a nearly hard vacuum might be profound.

There always seems to be something we don't know or aren't aware of yet, doesn't there?

[Sparky]

There always seems to be something we don't know or aren't aware of yet, doesn't there?

Well, there is very little that i am aware of, and what i think i know i hold as a temporary and subject to complete reversal. Just operate on what seems to be working well enough.

thanks

[Goldminer]

Please check out this experiment:
Looky here:

Resolving the Wave-Particle Paradox


Compare previous experiments with Reiter's


Why has it been since 2001 that Eric has been showing this sensational discovery, and nothing much has happened in the physical science community toward recognizing his work.

There are good reasons.

[Sparky]

au- , thanks for links... I have read some of Reiter's stuff...even wrote him an email to ask the probability of photon being a particle.
He was gracious enough to answer and to be quite clear that there was no chance that it is a particle.

I am not qualified to judge his experiment, though it does look to me as if it should be examined and verified.

Things at that level are complicated. To me, waves just make it impossible to understand. Maybe the only way to get a picture of it is with math, and that lets me out completely.

thanks

[mjv1121]

Sparky,

A useful area of thought to explore might be: "How can light be a wave?".
What is it that could be waving? : It cannot be TEMs, that is just nonsense. So presumably it would have to be an aether wave of some sort, but then you need to construct a model of an aether that is capable of transmitting waves for the purposes of light, and that can co-exist with charge and gravity and matter - LaFrenniere to the rescue? or is that simply further contrived distraction? I dismiss them as "clown" waves, but secretly I wish it were true. Alas, I cannot convince myself.

I have wondered, to what extent is it safe to consider the wave as a separate entity to the medium in which it waves? The path of the wave-centric thinker is strewn with pre-conceptions.

I have been so far unable to find any further mention of Planck's "Loading Theory" as mentioned by Eric, although it sounds as though it fits perfectly with my own thoughts.

The difficulty with Eric's work is to distinguish between the affects of:
- emission
- transmission
- the beam splitter intervention (much is presumed about the neutrality of its operation, without further consideration)
- reception
- translation of reception into an electrical impulse.

What is it, exactly, that he has shown? The data is only data through interpretation by theory - a rather unfortunate failing of all so called "empirical" data.

Keep thinking and if you solve particle/wave duality I would be quite interested.

Michael

[orrery]

Is this what you are looking for?

http://www.plasmaredshift.org//Curriculum_Vitae.html
http://www.plasmaredshift.org/
http://www.plasmaredshift.org//Article_Archive.html

It seems no matter how many times I post this information it goes ignored.

[Sparky]

mjv, I am lost in the particle/wave logic. I may need a revelation.


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orrery, thanks, but those sites are some that i can't download for some reason...I see some text, then it changes to a "flash" screen, which i assume is a video ....can't do videos....

[orrery]

mjv, I am lost in the particle/wave logic. I may need a revelation.


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orrery, thanks, but those sites are some that i can't download for some reason...I see some text, then it changes to a "flash" screen, which i assume is a video ....can't do videos....

They're not videos. Just documents in flash format. I assume you are probably using a browser without an adequate flash plugin. Do you need some troubleshooting help with your browser? Are you on an iPad?

[mjv1121]

orrey,

Err, no. Thanks orrey, but that's a different subject entirely.

Incidentally, I was an advocate of free-electron redshifting, but I have come to strongly suspect that cosmological redshift is caused by the passage of photons through the quantum aether field. Free-electron red-shifting is the process that causes intrinsic redshifts such as associated with quasars.

Michael

[orrery]

orrey,

Err, no. Thanks orrey, but that's a different subject entirely.

Incidentally, I was an advocate of free-electron redshifting, but I have come to strongly suspect that cosmological redshift is caused by the passage of photons through the quantum aether field. Free-electron red-shifting is the process that causes intrinsic redshifts such as associated with quasars.

Michael

I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, just complimentary.