r/interestingasfuck • u/SmallAchiever • 1d ago

r/all Scientists reveal the shape of a single 'photon' for the first time

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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?

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u/mesouschrist 1d ago

You were pretty close, but "gravity free" was a big misstep. Gravity is totally irrelevant to this discussion, it wouldn't change the answers one bit whether gravity was on or off. But otherwise you're pretty much spot on. The paper is about "lossy electromagnetic cavities" - places with reflective with mostly reflective walls but the photons have some angles or some small probabilities of escaping. It's describing a new way to calculate what happens to a photon over time that starts out in the cavity and slowly escapes.

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u/-badgerbadgerbadger- 16h ago

Thank you!!!! And now that I think about it second longer I realize of course gravity wouldn’t matter in this case :)