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- Swiss researchers have used lasers and nanowires to capture the images
- Scientists have been attempting to image light in both states for decades
- Albert Einstein was first to describe light as being both a wave and particle
- The experiment could lead to new types of super fast 'quantum computers'
Albert Einstein was the first person to describe this apparent dual state of light in 1905 in an attempt to explain some of the apparently contradictory behaviour it displays.
Yet when scientists attempt to observe these states, it has only ever been able to see light behave as photon particle or as an electromagnetic wave.
The work shows that Einstein was right when he proposed that electromagnetic radiation could behave as both a wave and a particle at the same time.
The technique for capturing the image could be used to help open up new areas of superfast computers that exploit the quantum states of materials.
He said: 'This experiment demonstrates that, for the first time ever, we can film quantum mechanics - and its paradoxical nature - directly.
'Being able to image and control quantum phenomena at the nanometer scale like this opens up a new route towards quantum computing.'
The wave-like behaviour of light can be seen clearly when sunlight is refracted through a prism and splits into the different colours according to the wavelengths of the light.
However, it can also be seen behaving like a particle - like photons hurled out as radiation by materials like uranium or when gas high in the atmosphere is battered by the solar wind to produce the aurora over the poles.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the research team conducted an experiment and then used electrons to image the light.
By firing a pulse of laser light at a tiny metal wire suspended on graphene, this added energy to the particle wire and caused them to vibrate.
Light then traveled along the wire in two possible directions. When the waves travelling in opposite directions meet each other they form a new 'standing wave' of light.
By then firing a stream of electrons close to the nanowire, they were able to image this wave in an ultrafast microscope due to the way the electrons sped up or slowed down.
Dr Carbone said that the resulting image produces a fingerprint of the wave-nature of light while also simultaneously demonstrating that it is a particle too.
The electrons pass close to the standing wave of light, they hit the photons it contains, again affecting the resulting image.
get back to your studies then !!!
