Wednesday, May 15, 2019

double slit experiment - How to prove wave nature of large object?


In double slit experiment only small sized particles were used. however if we use large objects such as a tennis ball, the expected pattern is not observed.


Why the wave nature is not visible for large objects in double slit experiment ?
How do I then prove that large objects also have wave nature?



Answer



The difficult bit is creating a coherent beam of large objects since the rate of decoherence increases rapidly with the size of the object. If you could create a coherent beam of tennis balls you could diffract it, but in the real world you wouldn't be able to maintain the coherence for longer than the tiniest fraction of a second. As far as I know the largest object that has been diffracted is a buckyball.



It's unlikely you'll ever be able to prove that objects the size of a tennis ball have wave like properties. However since QM correctly predicts diffraction for sizes ranging from electrons to buckyballs there's no obvious reason why this should break down for larger objects.


For more on this subject see the questions:


Will a football (soccer) diffract?


Validity of naively computing the de Broglie wavelength of a macroscopic object


Why doesn't a marble rolling on a table ever reflect back at the edge?


No comments:

Post a Comment

classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

I am studying Statics and saw that: The moment of a force about a given axis (or Torque) is defined by the equation: $M_X = (\vec r \times \...