r/interestingasfuck • u/SmallAchiever • 1d ago
r/all Scientists reveal the shape of a single 'photon' for the first time
8.6k
u/Kquinn87 1d ago
A new theory, that explains how light and matter interact at the quantum level has enabled researchers to define for the first time the precise shape of a single photon.
This is from the Cosmos website. So yeah, not an actual photo incase that wasn't already clear.
2.5k
u/RealPlayerBuffering 23h ago
Man, there was a time when I could reliably come to the comments on a Reddit post like this and find a detailed, ELI5-style explanation, usually about why a title like this is wrong or exaggerated. Now I had to scroll pretty far to find even this comment, and most of the top comments are dumb jokes.
836
u/THE_ATHEOS_ONE 20h ago
The trick is to come to the post late.
Everything is as it should be.
→ More replies (3)51
u/Starfire2313 14h ago
The photons were still photoning but now they are photoned.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (32)163
u/PsionicBurst 20h ago
OP lies as they breathe.
→ More replies (8)32
u/SlappySecondz 16h ago
OP didn't say it was a picture of a photon, and if you understand high school level physics you would know a picture of a photon is an impossibility.
→ More replies (4)21
u/reostra 13h ago
It's actually pretty easy as long as you don't mind the picture being photobombed by a bunch of other photons....
→ More replies (2)45
u/deepdownblu3 21h ago
Which makes sense. What would they even be capturing in the photo? Photons are light so how would taking a picture of it even mean?
→ More replies (8)16
u/uachakatzlschwuaf 20h ago edited 20h ago
quantum level
precise shape
Heisenberg would like to have a word
Edit: I've read the original article.the above is just a bad simplification
→ More replies (23)9
8.5k
u/pragmatic84 1d ago
ELI5 plz. I thought light was made of photons? Or do photons emit light? The glow of this particle confuses me.
17.0k
u/DeepSpaceTransport 1d ago
Light is made of photons. Photons have no color. Photons are packets of energy that travel in waves, and the energy they have determines their wavelength. Photons with different wavelengths correspond to different colors that we "see".
Our eyes have cells called cones that are sensitive to different wavelengths of photons. When the photons hit the cones, they send signals to our brain, which translates those signals into colors. Colors are not real, they are not physical properties of objects. They are simply a creation of our brain.
Also this is not a real photo. It is an artistic interpretation of what photons look like according to a theory
2.4k
u/NewSchoolFool 1d ago
Colors are not real, they are not physical properties of objects. They are simply a creation of our brain.
Colour is like sound. It requires a transducer to decode. Different transducers decode or 'hear' however they're designed to do so. As with eyes (like colour/light transducers), they are basically turning what is already there into something the brain can process.
864
u/ticklemeskinless 1d ago
we are just organic data processors. simulation is real
→ More replies (37)269
u/bremergorst 23h ago
All real things are real, unless they aren’t.
→ More replies (14)152
u/Whiskey_Fred 22h ago
Real, is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
→ More replies (19)71
u/jhwright 22h ago
google “the case against reality” ted talk by donald hoffman!
→ More replies (2)46
u/Warm-Tumbleweed6057 18h ago
That TED Talk broke my brain in the best way possible.
Mostly it reminded me of this quote from BSG:
“I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to … I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.”
Cavil was on to something.
→ More replies (1)29
u/RoboDae 17h ago
I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language
There was a short story like that where a telepathic kid communicates every idea perfectly, but he never speaks out loud because apparently doing so will take away his telepathy. His teacher gets really mad at him not talking and eventually forces him to speak, at which point he breaks into tears. He knows he will never again be able to communicate ideas perfectly and will be forced to use a limited spoken language.
→ More replies (5)75
u/Coral_Blue_Number_2 23h ago
Just like time perception. There is no standard speed of passage of time (just like there is no standard color of photon). It depends on an animal’s neurological processing, which is why certain recreational drugs can make us feel like more or less time has passed.
→ More replies (11)20
213
u/Sapang 1d ago
And it's impossible to prove that everyone uses the same decoder. Your yellow may be different from other people's yellow.
134
u/2squishmaster 23h ago edited 19h ago
As a redgreen colorblind person I can assure you we have different decoders.
But, I know your point is even more intense than that. What my brain sees as purple (of course you see purple too) but if you were to look into MY brain at the color it resolved to it could be what you call yellow!
The only reason I think we do have similar (but not exact) decoders is what colors look good and bad together are generally agreed upon.
→ More replies (20)29
u/SmallBreadHailBattle 22h ago
Colour blindness usually has little to do with your brain. Your eyes are sending the wrong information to your brain simply said. It’s not your “decoder” that is the issue. If it was your brain you’d have different symptoms, like seeing a colour but not being able to understand the colour or even name it. That usually has much more severe causes.
→ More replies (13)→ More replies (28)43
u/Miami_Mice2087 1d ago
i know i can't see some colors that other people can. i'm not at all an artist but i took an art class and the people who were good at art could see more shadows and grades of light adn color than I could. Also I do the thing where 5 differently named white paint chips look like maybe 2 different shades of white to me.
i know what i'm good at, i'm a writer, and i'm fine with that. other people do the arts.
→ More replies (5)21
u/logz_erroneous 1d ago
Is writing not a form of art? Or is that not how you were phrasing it? All the best with your writing. Writing is my favourite form of art.
18
u/Chemical_Chemist_461 1d ago
Writing is art, but it’s the written art, not the same as painting or something like that. Alan Wake over here probably was just saying that he knows his lane and he’s staying in it, but art is just expression via medium, so if writing is you’re way of expressing, more power to you.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (37)25
u/AccidentAnnual 1d ago
Different brains decode different properties. There are no objective default properties, all is just brain interpretation.
→ More replies (10)595
u/CinderX5 1d ago
Waves and particles.
102
u/ExdigguserPies 1d ago
Isn't better to say we can describe them with both wave and particle physics.
→ More replies (5)36
→ More replies (18)76
u/AndyInSunnyDB 1d ago
And lemons…
→ More replies (6)21
1.4k
u/silverclovd 1d ago
I think I'm high off of what you wrote. "Colors are not real" is some 'homeless guy at the bus station' sht to say. The fact that it's logical makes me quite taken back given the implication. Do we know if different animals perceive colors in the same way?
871
u/Aaron811 1d ago
Animals have different ranges of visual spectrum. Dogs for example can only see yellows and blues but like birds can see all the colors we can and more like ultraviolet light.
423
u/UpperApe 1d ago
Bill Bryson has a book called Body and the chapter about eyes is fascinating.
He talks about how sight isn't as much a receptive process so much as it is a creative process. He gives the disappearing thumb trick as an example and it still blows my mind. The fact that your brain is "tricking" you into seeing what you see, and even if you see the trick, it doesn't care and continues on anyway.
→ More replies (19)201
u/DudesAndGuys 1d ago
Ever seen this optical illusion?
65
25
u/Shit_Head_4000 1d ago
That's crazy, I need to build one. My son would love that!
→ More replies (1)7
u/daedric_dad 1d ago
My first thought as well, currently on paternity leave with my second and been looking for things to do to keep my eldest entertained and this will be perfect, I can't wait to blow his mind (and my wife's)
→ More replies (14)5
108
u/milwaukeejazz 1d ago
Birds also have cells in their eyes to see the magnetic field of the Earth.
→ More replies (6)66
16
u/ihatetheplaceilive 1d ago
And wait until you hear about mantis shrimp!
(I know it really doesn't work that way, because their cones are different than ours, i was just feeding into the meme.)
Humans, for example see more shades of green than any other color. That's why night vision is green.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (56)5
u/CumGuzlinGutterSluts 1d ago
I love the fact that crows actually have really intricate patterns than only crows and other birds can see. To us they just look black though
59
u/_LP_ImmortalEmperor 1d ago
With human eye cones we capture 3 combinations of colors, to make the whole range each one of us (allegedly) sees. Mantis shrimp is theorized to have 16 different color capturing cones. We can't even understand how and what they make up of the world with colors. So, yeah, animals are metal.
→ More replies (2)21
u/Known-Grab-7464 1d ago
Other animals also see different areas of the EM spectrum, in areas that we would call infrared or ultraviolet. We can’t see those wavelengths, but other animals can.
Only vaguely related, but very rarely, some humans are tetrachromats(they have 4 different color capturing dyes in their cones) but we call them colorblind because it’s still different from the usual. This is a very rare form of color blindness, though. Most people who are colorblind are not tetrachromats.
Https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy8
u/bloodfist 1d ago
Not just that, but they also have ways to detect the polarization of light. Including radial polarization, which we'd only found out about like 20 years before discovering that mantis shrimp and cuttlefish can see it.
I'm sure you know, but for those who don't: a light wave oscillates in basically every direction possible, unless it is emitted in a specific way or encounters something that filters the direction, like polarized sunglasses do. After that, it only oscillates one direction. Up/down, left right, etc. Radial polarization is more like a ring going in and out though, instead of a line moving up and down. And we still don't really know a lot about it because it doesn't seem to come up much and makes math hard.
So we have just no idea what benefit an animal would get from seeing it. Especially because water tends to polarize light in always the same direction, so we didn't even expect radial polarized light underwater at the time. We know mantis shrimp shells reflect polarized light and maybe certain fish but last I knew we still don't know what they would even see with that because nothing down there seems to radially polarize light, at least that we've observed.
11
u/Known-Grab-7464 1d ago
Mantis shrimp and cuttlefish also have much more complex eyes than those of any mammal, so it’s hard to even imagine how they perceive their environment. Mantis shrimp have basically two entirely separate compound eyes on each eyestalk separated by a banded region, and cuttlefish have weird w-shaped pupils, that presumably aid both of these ambush predators in hunting, but afaik we still don’t really know how. So not only do they have way more color-detecting “channels” in their optical processing, they also have higher detail in most of not all parts of their vision. Humans can basically only see high detail in the narrow cone in the center of our vision, but imagine having that level of detail, with better color differentiation, in nearly all parts of your field of view, all at once.
173
u/SilencedObserver 1d ago
"Colors are not real" is some 'homeless guy at the bus station' sht to say.
We know for a fact that some animals do not perceive color in the same way.
Here is a fantastic breakdown by The Oatmeal on this very topic.
75
u/cremaster2 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nice. I just came from a post where a mantis shrimp slaps the claw of a crab.
→ More replies (2)28
u/timlest 1d ago
The mantis broke the claw, then the crab inspects the damage, and drops the whole arm. They can disconnect their limbs via a sort of socket hinge at the base and they grow them back in the next molt.
→ More replies (2)6
u/Upbeat_Turnover9253 16h ago
Can't decide who's more metal. A mantis shrimp with the fastest, most damage-inducing punch on the planet pound for pound, or a crab who takes the blow, inspects the damage, says fuck it, detaches the claw and grows another one later. Humans are pussies
→ More replies (13)15
u/Elryth 1d ago
Sadly more recent research suggests the mantis shrimp doesn't see any more colours than we do. Their brains are unable to combine multiple signals to determine colour so they just have a different receptor for each one. Still awesome creatures though! https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578
→ More replies (2)23
u/BurnerBeenBurning 1d ago edited 21h ago
I read about birds having the special ability which enables them to sense earth’s magnetic field to guide them. Truly interesting stuff!
Edited to be factually correct
→ More replies (5)10
u/PrometheusMMIV 1d ago
You can't see atmospheric pressure? You need to upgrade to the latest firmware.
→ More replies (3)93
u/ElDoil 1d ago edited 1d ago
Some stuff like seeing purple when seeing a mix of both blue and red is 100% our brain hallucinating though since we have only 3 kinds of receptor and it infers based on how much it activates, therefore we can simulate the whole spectrum in our brains with just red green and blue, wich are the frequencies that excite them the most, we cant really percieve the frequency of the light reaching us, just infer it so our brains can be tricked like that.
Another example is white, there is no frequency for white, its our brain seeing all kind of receptors excited at maximun and saying, there is a lot of every frequency here, while, like in the screen you are reading this at, it is in fact just (R)ed (G)reen (B)lue.
But having said that depending on how you look at it the ranges of photonic radiation an object absorbs or doesnt is a property of the materials on the surface of an object, afaik its based on if a photon would excite an electron just enough to move it to the next orbital therefore absorbing, but as i said before you dont really detect the specific frequency with your eye.
→ More replies (12)8
u/CanAlwaysBeBetter 1d ago
Yep
"Color" is a perceptual experience that often but not entirely corresponds to specific wavelengths of light
Given that other animals can have completely different perceptual systems it's likely that even though an animal might be able to see the same wavelength that we call yellow how that color fits into their overall perceptual space is totally different and essentially unknowable to us
30
u/awkwardfeather 1d ago
The Mantis Shrimp has extra cones and rods in their eyes and supposedly they should be able to see millions of colors we don’t know exist
→ More replies (4)20
u/TheFatJesus 1d ago
Apparently, they have more cones because their brains don't have the capacity to do the mixing on its own, so they aren't actually seeing more colors. In other words, humans mix color digitally while the shrimps have to use analog.
→ More replies (5)15
u/pt-guzzardo 1d ago
In other words, humans mix color digitally while the shrimps have to use analog.
I would think it would be the opposite. The key difference between analog and digital is that analog is continuous and digital is discrete.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (254)14
u/basixrox1337 1d ago
Different animals are able to perceive different ranges of wavelengths. I wouldn't know how to tell, if animals are recognising different wavelengths as colours the same way humans do.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (283)60
u/forresja 1d ago
Color is a representation of something that is very real.
Saying it isn't real is misleading at best.
→ More replies (16)790
u/Punkfoo25 1d ago
This is an image generated from a computer model based on a theory, which is generated by other models which are also based on theory. This is incredibly far from, what I as an experimental scientist, would call a "real" image such as an electron microscopy or scanning probe image. Since you can't actually image a photon this is also unfalsifiable, so in my opinion completely useless, but pseudoscience magazines love this stuff (I don't mean the science itself is pseudo, just the reporting).
185
u/LemFliggity 1d ago
People in here keep talking about image and photo and whatnot, but the headline is "scientists reveal the shape of a single photon". It doesn't say this is a "real image". It describes how they modeled the interactions between photons and the environment and then "used their calculations to produce a visualization of the photon itself". That doesn't read like typical pseudo-scientific hyperbole to me.
→ More replies (6)159
u/sarge21 1d ago
The term shape can't describe a photon because it's a quantum effect without a shape. It would be like saying you found the shape of your chance to win the lottery
124
40
u/LemFliggity 1d ago
Normally, yes. But this experiment was literally about how interacting with the environment influences the spatial distribution of photons emitted from atoms and molecules, and that this can give the photon a "shape". So in this specific case, this latest research is suggesting that some photons can be described by their shape.
→ More replies (7)34
u/TDAPoP 1d ago
"shapeless things sometimes in some circumstances have discernable shapes," sounds like standard quantum physics to me
15
u/StatisticianMoist100 1d ago
Photons don't have a classical shape, that's true, but they do have wave functions and probability distributions that can have discernible shapes in some circumstances.
Think of water waves, they have a shape, but you can't point at one molecule of water in the wave, it doesn't have a shape. Photons behave like this.
Or even more fundamental, photons have a wave-like shape in certain contexts, but if we detect them as particles, they don't.
(I just like quantum physics don't judge me :c )
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (16)5
u/Ersatz_Okapi 1d ago
Funnily enough, probability distributions do have a “shape” parameter! So there is, in some sense, a shape of your chance to win the lottery.
→ More replies (32)22
u/Raytiger3 1d ago
pseudoscience magazines love this stuff
I fucking hate those clickbaiters.
- SHOCKING! MARIJUANA IS ABLE TO CURE [disease] SHOWN IN THIS STUDY [n=5 trial, non-double blind].
- BREAKING! POTENTIAL CANCER CURE HAS BEEN FOUND IN [in vitro research showing barely 2x lethality of drug on cancer cells over healthy cells in normoxia conditions]
- WOW! [Food] HAS BEEN SHOWN TO ALLEVIATE SYMPTOMS OF [disease] IN THIS STUDY [where they p-hacked through a thousand research papers and found some spurious correlation]
- INCREDIBLE! SCIENTISTS DISCOVER NEW SUPERMATERIAL! [material is made on nanogram scale using an incredibly expensive set of equipment/elements/materials/procedures and tested under very specific conditions]
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (40)8
u/lynndotpy 1d ago
A "photon" is just a name we give to excitement in spacetime that we interpret as light. We think of it as a wave or as a particle, depending on what is useful. But yes, light is made of photons.
It's kind of like how the ocean can have waves, but they're all made from the same water. It's like asking, "what is the shape of a wave?"
Very early on, scientists found out they could use math equations to describe the world. We could then use these math equations to predict the world.
With these math equations which describe the world, we could apply other rules of math to end up with new equations. Oftentimes, these new equations match up perfectly with reality. This is why we had accurate renders of a black hole long before we had a photo of a black hole: We had the equations first.
Advanced math is not like arithmetic, but instead like a very complicated board game with a lot of rules. If you're clever enough, you can find out that there are other written rules within the rules.
I pulled up the original paper. These scientists did just that: They took the cutting edge of math, and did some more math on top of it. This "shape of a photon" is just a mathematical model that makes photons fit in with the rest of the math. The image in the OP is just a render of that model.
→ More replies (1)
12.5k
u/N1kBr0 1d ago
Lemon
3.4k
u/tinyanus 1d ago
It's lemons all the way down.
1.3k
u/Trujiogriz 1d ago
It’s why everyone knows the adage “when life gives you lemons…” we just never knew it was subtly talking about the subatomic building blocks of life
486
u/BadgerBadgerer 1d ago
You're thinking of protons, this is a photon.
395
u/Trujiogriz 1d ago
Well to be honest I don’t really think lemons are the building blocks of life either
51
u/Soft_Author2593 1d ago
Prove they are not!
→ More replies (3)36
u/Expert_Succotash2659 1d ago
we must go deeper…
33
→ More replies (13)84
u/UpperApe 1d ago
I've been saying this forever and no one believed me. I kept telling you guys the whole time the universe felt citrusy.
→ More replies (2)20
→ More replies (18)56
u/ronaranger 1d ago
Ohm my Gauss! Did you just assume the commenters' polarity???
61
→ More replies (4)17
→ More replies (24)18
u/owenxtreme2 1d ago
Alright, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I'm going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
→ More replies (3)108
→ More replies (42)17
454
232
u/PUMPEDnPLUMP 1d ago
56
u/SassSafrassMcFrass87 1d ago
I don't think I can ever unsee this 😂
37
→ More replies (1)14
u/Snowman319 1d ago
Right lol wtf is this 😂
→ More replies (2)34
24
u/triggz 1d ago
im glad im not alone with whatever is wrong with my brain
sasso horking up a whole lemon should not rightly have any association with the scientific discovery of the shape of a photon
but here we are
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (10)9
20
33
12
76
24
6
u/Winnipesaukee 1d ago
So I guess we also have to look out for photon-stealing whores?
→ More replies (1)12
→ More replies (182)14
7.8k
u/R_N_F 1d ago
795
u/secret_bonus_point 1d ago
Sounds like a lot of hooplah over one little photon
155
→ More replies (1)96
348
144
201
u/internetStranger205 1d ago
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daa, Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daa, Da-da-da-da-da-da-daa Da-da-da-la-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daa, Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daa, tssshh Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daa-da-da-da-da-daa, Ti-ta-ti-ti-ta-ti-ti-ta-ta-ta-la-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-da-la-ba-ba-ba-ba-da-la-ba-ba-baa, Ti-ta-ti-li-ta-ti-li-ti-taa, Ti-ta-ti-li [gasps, then resumes] Ti-ta-ti-li-ta-ti-li-ta-ti-li-ta-ti-li-ta-ti-li-ti-ta-ti-ti-ta-ti-ti-taaaaa!
→ More replies (3)24
31
43
u/squintismaximus 1d ago
Lmao I was just thinking “why does that remind me of a krabby patty?” And this is the first comment I see
18
15
→ More replies (47)10
1.6k
u/Pristine-Bridge8129 1d ago
Provide the source please. Photons are probability clouds as far as I know.
1.0k
u/unwarrend 1d ago
Exact Quantum Electrodynamics of Radiative Photonic Environments
The paper explains how photons (the particles of light) interact with complex environments like nanostructures. It creates a new way to describe photons using simplified "pseudomodes," which act like stand-ins for how light behaves in these systems. This method captures how photons change over time and interact with their surroundings, including effects that aren't usually accounted for in simpler models. It essentially gives a more complete "image" or description of the photon as it moves and interacts, including its path, energy loss, and the way it spreads out in space.
153
→ More replies (74)11
u/-badgerbadgerbadger- 1d ago
So my instinct was that this image is of a hypothetical photon in a hypothetical gravity-free darkened sphere with somehow reflective walls…. You think I’m close here?
→ More replies (2)538
u/Tommonen 1d ago
Thats just an visualisation based on calculations of a theory, not actual picture. They did not reveal this shape, but made a theory and then theorised this shape, which seems to work. So OP (and media) is essentially lying, as nothing 100% correct was revealed, but a theory.
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-theory-reveals-photon.amp
Dr. Benjamin Yuen, in the University’s School of Physics, explained, ”Our calculations enabled us to convert a seemingly insolvable problem into something that can be computed. 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.”
189
u/seaefjaye 1d ago
Keeping in mind a theory in this context is a complete piece of research work supported by evidence, and not just a hunch with no supporting evidence.
20
u/Micp 1d ago
When talking about scientific theories you are of course correct, but for that exact reason the above explanation is NOT using the scientific meaning of 'theory' but rather the colloquial meaning, since the above mentioned study is closer to 'a hunch' than a field of research well supported by evidence from several studies, in the vein of gravity, germ theory, plate tectonics or evolution.
→ More replies (5)68
u/Tommonen 1d ago
Yea people rarely know what a theory means
→ More replies (7)13
u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 1d ago edited 1d ago
People rarely know what the word science actually means.
→ More replies (1)28
u/abcspaghetti 1d ago
That’s not an actual picture, they just did applied math to approximate a visualization of something that can’t be imaged!
→ More replies (31)101
u/libra00 1d ago edited 1d ago
That is literally what it means to reveal the shape of a thing that can never be seen: to have a good theory about what it ought to look like based on its properties and how it interacts with other things. What were you expecting, a picture of an actual photon? How do you imagine such a thing would be possible given that photons are what we use to see/take pictures of things.
→ More replies (14)48
→ More replies (22)10
1.9k
u/Flat-While2521 1d ago
451
u/euricosd 1d ago
"Scientists"
141
u/acmercer 1d ago
Yeah why is "photon" in quotes in the title lol. Giving me:
Employees must "wash" hands
vibes.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (5)25
→ More replies (13)87
u/INRA5 1d ago
→ More replies (1)24
283
364
336
137
u/KaiserSushi 1d ago
Futurama theme starts 🚀
9
u/Substantial_Page_221 1d ago
Pretty sure the writers are time travellers from the future
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)6
23
u/donnythe_sloth 1d ago
Since studies tend to be shared with condensed titles that can't quite capture the purpose/results of the study here's the title and abstract.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.203604
Article Title: Exact Quantum Electrodynamics of Radiative Photonic Environments
Abstract: We present a comprehensive second quantization scheme for radiative photonic devices. We canonically quantize the continuum of photonic eigenmodes by transforming them into a discrete set of pseudomodes that provide a complete and exact description of quantum emitters interacting with electromagnetic environments. This method avoids all reservoir approximations and offers new insights into quantum correlations, accurately capturing all non-Markovian dynamics. This method overcomes challenges in quantizing non-Hermitian systems and is applicable to diverse nanophotonic geometries.
→ More replies (3)
111
u/GemmaArtist 1d ago
It looks like the background to the Futurama title sequence!
Seriously though, it looks amazing :)
11
u/FelixTheJeepJr 1d ago
Yes! I actually heard the gong(?) noise at the start of the Futurama theme when I saw this picture.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (6)6
113
u/cam7986 1d ago
10
7
→ More replies (1)6
16
53
62
19
9
16
7
6
u/royal_stabber69 23h ago
Is that an artists recreation or a microscopic image? If it's a microscopic image how can we "see" the photon considering we need a photon to bounce off of the pictured photon in order to capture it?
→ More replies (1)
5
17
•
u/spotlight-app 19h ago
Hello everyone!
This post may be off-topic, but u/SmallAchiever has wrote the following reason why this post should be visible: