Here's a mathcad document that people may enjoy playing with or modifiying. I originally created it to model Young's double slit diffraction experiment to answer some questions on the nature of coherence. It's set up to generate a picture of the double slit diffraction pattern with a piece of glass placed in front of one of the holes. The diffraction pattern can be varied by changing this piece of glass as well as the line width of the illumination source.
I hope everything's set up ok. I had to chop the bottom half off the original worksheet because the movie generation stuff was locking up my system and I don't have time to figure out why at the moment.
The philosophical question this was targeting is what does it mean to have an incoherent interaction between photons? If the interaction of photons can be correctly analyzed as a coherent superposition of states, can the interaction ever be incoherent? There are some very subtle issues about the meaning of coherence, but most experiments that "prove" there is an incoherent interaction amongst photons can be recast as the double slit experiment. The question then becomes, since the problem can be analyzed by fourier analysis which is a coherent superposition of a mathematically complete set of plane waves, do photons ever interact incoherently?
Much of the debate about incoherence comes down to semantics, and there are some real questions about how to analyze the diffraction of photons emitted by different stars, but it turns out that most of the common experiments I've run into that explain incoherence are computed equally well by coherent mathementics. For those interested in the problem, here's a starting point.
Robert
I hope everything's set up ok. I had to chop the bottom half off the original worksheet because the movie generation stuff was locking up my system and I don't have time to figure out why at the moment.
The philosophical question this was targeting is what does it mean to have an incoherent interaction between photons? If the interaction of photons can be correctly analyzed as a coherent superposition of states, can the interaction ever be incoherent? There are some very subtle issues about the meaning of coherence, but most experiments that "prove" there is an incoherent interaction amongst photons can be recast as the double slit experiment. The question then becomes, since the problem can be analyzed by fourier analysis which is a coherent superposition of a mathematically complete set of plane waves, do photons ever interact incoherently?
Much of the debate about incoherence comes down to semantics, and there are some real questions about how to analyze the diffraction of photons emitted by different stars, but it turns out that most of the common experiments I've run into that explain incoherence are computed equally well by coherent mathementics. For those interested in the problem, here's a starting point.
Robert