Thursday, October 3, 2019

quantum mechanics - Is there record of a bosonic Stern-Gerlach measurement?


I cannot seem to find any peer-reviewed (or other) reference to an integer-spin Stern-Gerlach experiment. It shouldn't be too hard to do: just find you friendly neighbourhood Deuterium ion and shoot it through a Stern-Gerlach magnet.


Can one devise a photonic Stern-Gerlach experiment, i.e. spatial seperation of polarization states? One should also see only two states in this case, because the spin-0 photon state is "reserved" for EM-interactions (this might be too simple a statement, but this is how I understand it currently).


EDIT it seems some of you are misunderstanding the question: I am inquiring about a Stern-Gerlach-like experiment, where spin states have been split, and by extension the perpendicular nature of non-commuting measurements. So only the concept of the S-G experiment as extensively described in introductory QM textbooks such as Sakurai.



Answer



You can absolutely do a corresponding experiment with light. In fact, it's the easiest way by far. Instead of a magnetic field, you would use a polarizing beam splitter to separate the two states, which as the name suggests is a cube that reflects light of one polarization and passes light of the other polarization. To do a Stern-Gerlach like experiment all one needs is a polarized photon source, a few of these cubes and a few half waveplates to change photon polarization, and then some photon detector looking at outputs.


This wouldn't normally be called a Stern-Gerlach experiment, which is specific to using a magnetic field to separate particles with magnetic moments, but the mathematics describing it is the same, as is the basic lesson that angular momentum is quantized and measurements in different directions don't commute.


As for atoms, a quick search found a Stern-Gerlach like experiment with not just single atoms, but a BEC: http://www.uibk.ac.at/exphys/ultracold/projects/rubidium/rb87bec/ I can't immediately find a single-atom experiment with Rubidium, but I bet it's out there if you look around.


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 \...