Recent content by dentedduck

I've often read that the emission spectrum of a fluorescent molecule is independent of the wavelength used for the excitation. But what happens in the case of a small Stoke's shift where the excitation and emission wavelengths overlap? If I use a narrow band excitation with a wavelength in...

Great, thanks!

Sorry, I haven't used it, but I do have a project coming up where I will try it out. I'll let you know how it goes. Dave

Wouldn't that be the semiclassical description? A fully QM description would need to define a quantum state for the photon and that would be a superposition state.

Hey, thanks for your reply! I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one confused. I checked out the paper he references by Chemla (http://iopscience.iop.org/0034-4885/43/10/001) a portion of which is attached. That one seems to be a pretty good review of the topic. While he doesn't...

I think that the real question is, what does it mean for a photon to _not_ have a polarization? My understanding is that the quantum mechanical description of an unpolarized photon would be one where the quantum state is in a superposition of different states such that an ensemble measurement...

There is an article that I once read talking about faster than light particles that could have been created in the big bang, but would be relegated to always being faster than light. They wouldn't be able to slow down and would be trapped on the other side of the asymptote. I think this is...

I've heard that Camtasia is good and there should be a free version.

Check out the link: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HomogeneousOrdinaryDifferentialEquation.html

No, as with all objects, as the relative speed between the two increases, relativistic effects (such as increased mass and time dilation) work to create a limit on their speeds. Dave

I've been reading a bit recently on Second Harmonic Generation and came across a supposedly separate technique called Hyper-Rayleigh Scattering (HRS). Can anyone explain the difference? I came across this paper, but didn't understand the difference...

Yes. The complication in reconciling the wave properties of light with the particle-like photons is in understanding that a single photon can be considered as a short pulse of a wave, or a wave packet. That means that it still has a direction for the oscillation of the electric field, and...