Photon Wave Collapse Experiment (Yeah sure; AJP Sep 2004, Thorn )

[vanesch]

It is typical for a differential eq's linearization procedures to introduce vast quantities of redundant functions which evolve linearly, instead of a single function which evolves non-linearly.

[...]

That is precisely the relation between the Maxwell-Dirac equations and the multiparticle QM formalism. The latter is a linearized approximation of the former. The entangled states are simply result of the coarse-graining of the nonlinear evolution, which introduces artificial indeterminism in the approximate linear evolution.

I know that you can solve a non-linear differential equation by going to a Hilbert space mechanism. However, what you have completely missed is that in the case of QFT, the Hilbert space is there BY POSTULATE.
Now, you (and Barut and others) can think that this is the same machinery at work, and that people are in fact, without knowing, using this "linearised hilbert space mechanism" to solve, without their knowing, a non-linear differential equation. But that idea is fundamentally flawed for an obvious reason:
the postulates of quantum theory ASSOCIATE A DIFFERENT PHYSICAL STATE to each element of the hilbert state. The non-linear PDE cannot do that. So it could be (it isn't, but the reasons are somewhat difficult to go into) that the linearised system ALSO ALLOWS SOLUTIONS TO THE PDE. But it contains immensely MORE solutions, and BY POSTULATE they are all true, physical states which are distinguishable one from another. This very fundamental postulate of quantum theory makes that it doesn't even matter if the Hilbert system is the result of a linearization or not of a NL PDE. We are now linked directly to the Hilbert space by postulate.

So in any case, the QFT contains many more physical situations than could ever be described by the non-linear PDE ; that's the FUNDAMENTAL CONTENT OF THE SUPERPOSITION PRINCIPLE I have been claiming you don't understand, and of which what you write above is again an illustration.

Now, that doesn't mean that QFT is the "correct" theory, and the NL PDE is the "wrong" theory or vice versa: only experiment can tell. But one thing is sure: the NL PDE doesn't describe the same physical theory as the QFT, which contains immensely more potential physical situations.
You can call them "spurious" but according to quantum theory, they are not. So that's a clear difference between both physical theories.

Now, you were making a claim about a prediction of QFT. If you do so, you should work with QFT, and not with the theory you think should replace it (the NL PDE). And the predictions of QFT are, for this setup, very clear: we have anti-correlation. This can be experimentally right, or it can be wrong. But one thing is sure: QFT predicts anti-correlation.
If you say that you work out a prediction of QFT, but:
- you do not accept the superposition principle
- you do not accept von Neumann's measurement theory
- you do not accept the usual links between systems and their mathematical representation in standard QFT
- you base yourself on another theory (NL PDE) of which you think erroneously that it is the superceding theory of QFT
...

well, then you're not working out a prediction of QFT :-)
If you claim that it does, it can only mean that you don't understand fundamental aspects of QFT, and those aspects are so fundamental, that it makes me conclude that you don't understand the basic postulates of quantum theory in its generality.

Otherwise you wouldn't claim that QFT makes these predictions: you would say that you have another theory, which contains the only "valid" predictions of QFT, and which theory does not predict anticorrelations. Even that would be wrong, but less so. The solutions of the NL PDE are not even in general the "converging solutions" of QFT. But it doesn't matter. The important point is that you recognize that what you are claiming is not a prediction of QFT.

That's all I'm saying.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[nightlight]

For convenience, here is the list of references all in one place (some for later:).

References [/size]

1. J.J. Thorn, M.S. Neel, V.W. Donato, G.S. Bergreen, R.E. Davies, M. Beck
"Observing the quantum behavior of light in an undergraduate laboratory"[/color]
http://marcus.whitman.edu/~beckmk/QM/grangier/Thorn_ajp.pdf
http://marcus.whitman.edu/~beckmk/QM/

2. J. F. Clauser
"Experimental distinction between the quantum and classical field-theoretic predictions for the photoelectric effect''[/color]
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v9/i4/p853_1

3. P. Grangier, G. Roger, and A. Aspect
"Experimental evidence for a photon anticorrelation effect on a beam splitter: A new light on single-photon interferences''[/color]
Europhys. Lett. 1, 173-179 (1986).

4. R. J. Glauber
"Optical coherence and photon statistics"[/color]
in Quantum Optics and Electronics, ed. C. de Witt-Morett, A. Blandin, and C. Cohen-Tannoudji
(Gordon and Breach, New York, 1965), pp. 63-185.

5. Z.Y. Ou, L. Mandel
"Violation of Bell's Inequality and Classical Probability in a Two-Photon Correlation Experiment" [/color]
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v61/i1/p50_1

6. P.L. Kelly and W.H. Kleiner,
"Theory of electromagnetic field measurement and photoelectron counting"[/color]
Phys. Rev. 136, A316-A334 (1964).

7. L. Mandel, E.C.G. Sudarshan, E. Wolf
"Theory of Photoelectric Detection of Light Fluctuations"[/color]
Proc. Phys Soc. 84 (1964) 435-444.

8. L. Mandel
"Configuration-Space Photon Number Operators in Quantum Optics"[/color]
Phys. Rev 144, 1071-1077 (1966)

9. L. Mandel, E. Wolf
"Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics"[/color]
Cambridge Univ. Press., Cambridge (1995)

10. Edo Waks et al.
"High Efficiency Photon Number Detection for Quantum Information Processing"[/color]
quant-ph/0308054

11. M. C. de Oliveira, S. S. Mizrahi, V. V. Dodonov
"A consistent quantum model for continuous photodetection processes"[/color]
quant-ph/0307089

12. S.S. Mizrahi, V.V. Dodonov
"Creating quanta with 'annihilation' operator"[/color]
quant-ph/0207035

13. F. X. Kärtner and H. A. Haus
"Quantum-nondemolition measurements and the `collapse of the wave function' "[/color]
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v47/i6/p4585_1

14. R.Y. Chiao, P.G. Kwiat
"Heisenberg's Introduction of the `Collapse of the Wavepacket' into Quantum Mechanics"[/color]
quant-ph/0201036

15. V. Bykov
"Photons, photocounts and laser detection of weak optical signals"[/color]
http://www.ensmp.fr/aflb/AFLB-26j/aflb26jp115.htm

16. T. S. Larchuk, M. C. Teich, and B. E. A. Saleh
"Statistics of Entangled-Photon Coincidences in Parametric Downconversion"[/color]
Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 755, 680-686 (1995)

17. A. Joobeur, B. E. A. Saleh, T. S. Larchuk, and M. C. Teich
"Coherence Properties of Entangled Light Beams Generated by Parametric Down-Conversion: Theory and Experiment" [/color]
Phys. Rev. A 53, 4360-4371 (1996). Other M.C. Teich papers of interest.

18. P.N. Kaloyerou
"The GRA Beam-Splitter Experiment and Wave-Particle Duality of Light"[/color]
quant-ph/0503201

 

[vanesch]

For convenience, here is the list of references all in one place (some for later:).

Thanks ! That will be useful :-)

cheers,
patrick.

 

[nightlight]

Thanks ! That will be useful :-)
cheers,
patrick.

In the continuation of this discussion in the couple ongoing threads on sci.physics.research, arguing against some Quantum Optician, few days ago I cricized Roy Glauber, the founder of modern Quantum Optics. Well, today http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/2005/index.html. Interesting timing.

The two sci.physics.research threads (where I also post as 'nightlight') are:

1. photoelectric effect : hypothetical experiment (the same kind of experiment discussed here).
2. The time it takes to emit one photon

 

[DrChinese]

In the continuation of this discussion in the couple ongoing threads on sci.physics.research, arguing against some Quantum Optician, few days ago I cricized Roy Glauber, the founder of modern Quantum Optics. Well, today http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/2005/index.html. Interesting timing. ...

I bet they decided to award him the Nobel just to bug you. Seriously, don't you ever get tired of beating yourself over the head?

The very purpose of the experiment you critized when you started this thread off was one which is intended for the undergraduate lab. That means it is mainstream stuff. I am sure that within a short period of time, these setups will begin proliferating. If you can see the "flaw" in the theory, don't you think some else will too? Or maybe you could "enlighten" them. Or better, get your own (the price is dropping fast) and prove everyone else wrong, even Glauber.

This is a recent quote from nightlight:

"Thanks for offering one more illustration of a typical 'QO sleight of
hand' -- pretend that the fundamental QO subtractions (which are built
into the very definition of Glauber's filtered correlation functions
Gn()) are due to some kind of minor and temporary technological
imperfection, to be overcome soon."

In all of the tests: once the proper people (i.e. "real" scientists and not some dumb Nobel dudes) do the proper experiment with the properly calibrated and high resoultion equipment, YOU WILL BE VINDICATED. Please ignore the fact that every photon test is currently headed AWAY from your assertions and towards QO predicted values. After all: that just PROVES there is a conspiracy, n'est-ce pas?

You are not searching for a common truth, you are looking for a way to maintain your archaic views from the advances of science. Your criticism disguises this simple fact, which is fairly evident to others. The true reason your selected criticisms don't really work is because you provide no alternative theoretical framework to explain the actual results. That would be necessary to get anyone to take you seriously. But that is impossible because of this little thing called Bell's Theorem. C'est la vie!

 

[nightlight]

The very purpose of the experiment you critized when you started this thread off was one which is intended for the undergraduate lab. That means it is mainstream stuff[/color].

So was the geocentric astronomy and lots of other nonsense we laugh at today. The result claimed by the AJP/2004 authors [1], in addition to being misleading to physicists outside of Quantum Optics in the usual "QO sleight of hand" way (such as Clauser [2], Grangier et al. [3] and other such QO experiments and claims), is an outright falsity[/color] (since no such effect is predicted by the QED/QO and other experimenters, such as Clauser [2], Grangier et al [3], Chiao & Kwiat [14] ... don't ever claim violations on the actual counts but only on Glauber type of "counts" i.e. only for the subsample of data which has the unpaired singles and accidental coincidences filtered out, the procedure which, as they recognize [14], makes their results entirely explicable by the straightforward classical models of the setup) and a blatant experimental fraud perpetrated in support of their false notions of what was supposed to happen. You are welcome to address the technical substance[/color] of my debunking of their experiment (which started this thread). Or go ask Prof. Beck if you can't do it on your own.

I am sure that within a short period of time, these setups will begin proliferating. If you can see the "flaw" in the theory, don't you think some else will too? ... This is a recent quote from nightlight:...

Again, you are welcome to address the technical substance[/color] of the theoretical "flaw" (it is merely a 'sleight of hand', which 'only' misleads physicists as to what the experimental facts are, and not an outright lie or a formal flaw) being discussed, especially as explained in the critique of the 1988 Ou & Mandel's paper [5], in particular in the sci.phys.research post #1 and post #2.

For that (or to at least begin discussing the same subject, for a change), you do need to read and understand the actual references, in particular Glauber [4] and Ou & Mandel [5] being talked about (if you want to refute me there, note that sci.physics.research is a moderated newsgroup, so you would need to know a bit what you're posting about; even physicists get their posts rejected there).

The true reason your selected criticisms don't really work is because you provide no alternative theoretical framework to explain the actual results.

Of course, I do. I merely don't provide any "alternative" theory of my own here. I don't need to since the alternative theories already exist. For example, Barut's Self-field ED explains all of QED phenomena (to at least alpha^5 order i.e. as far as the high precision QED test go). The Quantum Optics phenomena discussed here, which don't involve any QED radiative corrections (the QED of Quantum Optics is just the Old QED of Dirac, Heisenberg and Jordan from 1920s, with the Einstein's lightquantum imagery and heuristics of early 1900s used in pedagogical and popular expositions), are already completely quantitatively accounted for by the Marshall & Santos SED/SO (which is an approximation to Barut's SFED). Both were discussed and well referenced earlier in this thread, so I won't follow you back to square one on that. (As always, you are welcome to address the technical substance[/color] of anything I said earlier.)

As to the rest of your thoughts offered in your "reply", I am not interested in spending any time at all on your "psychoanalysis" of myself (you should take those valuable thoughts to some psychiatry or Freud forum where they can be truly appreciated, this is just physics being discussed here[/color]).


References

1. J.J. Thorn, M.S. Neel, V.W. Donato, G.S. Bergreen, R.E. Davies, M. Beck
"Observing the quantum behavior of light in an undergraduate laboratory"[/color]
http://marcus.whitman.edu/~beckmk/QM/grangier/Thorn_ajp.pdf
http://marcus.whitman.edu/~beckmk/QM/

2. J. F. Clauser
"Experimental distinction between the quantum and classical field-theoretic predictions for the photoelectric effect''[/color]
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v9/i4/p853_1

3. P. Grangier, G. Roger, and A. Aspect
"Experimental evidence for a photon anticorrelation effect on a beam splitter: A new light on single-photon interferences''[/color]
Europhys. Lett. 1, 173-179 (1986). http://kh.bu.edu/qcl/pdf/grangiep19867a0e0f09.pdf

4. R. J. Glauber "Optical coherence and photon statistics"[/color]
in Quantum Optics and Electronics (1964 Les Houches Lectures)
ed. C. de Witt-Morett, A. Blandin, and C. Cohen-Tannoudji
(Gordon and Breach, New York, 1965), pp. 63-185.

5. Z.Y. Ou, L. Mandel
"Violation of Bell's Inequality and Classical Probability in a Two-Photon Correlation Experiment"[/color]
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v61/i1/p50_1 http://puhep1.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/QM/ou_prl_61_50_88.pdf

14. R.Y. Chiao, P.G. Kwiat
"Heisenberg's Introduction of the `Collapse of the Wavepacket' into Quantum Mechanics"[/color]
quant-ph/0201036

 

[DrChinese]

Or go ask Prof. Beck if you can't do it on your own.

I have spoken to Beck on previous occasions, and I don't think he would be likely to spend a lot of time debating you.

And since you mentioned the subtraction of accidentals issue... let me quote from a nearly identical experiment to the Thorn/Beck et al experiment, that of http://users.icfo.es/Morgan.Mitchell/QOQI2005/DehlingerMitchellAJP2002EntangledPhotonsNonlocalityAndBellInequalitiesInTheUndergraduateLaboratory.pdf :

S=2.307 +/- 0.035

a violation of the Bell inequality by more than eight standard deviations. This result conclusively eliminates the HVTs, and is consistent with quantum mechanics. Also shown is the computed number of accidental coincidences, the average number of times that photons from two different downconversion events will arrive, purely by happenstance, within the coincidence interval t of each other. This background is small, nearly constant, and acts to decrease |S|. A finding of |S|>2 thus cannot be an artifact of the accidental background.

In other words, even in an undergraduate lab they are well aware of the critique of Bell tests as to the "accidentals" issue, and so they addressed it head on. I don't know why you local realists have so much trouble accepting something so simple. Accept the experimental evidence for what it is: conclusive by mainstream standards. When you have some mainstream evidence for your position, then we will be here to listen to it.

P.S. I think it is embarassing that you would support your position with the pitifully flimsy argument that "scientists have been wrong in the past." You can do better than that.

 

[vanesch]

nightlight,

The problem we are having increasingly is that your views are not mainstream views. This doesn't mean necessarily that they have no value, but the PF guidelines want discussions to be limited to mainstream issues, and referring to the entire quantum optics community as cheaters, the very year when one of its founding fathers got the Nobel prize in physics, illustrates the difficulty.
I enjoyed discussing with you in the past, but I wasn't a mentor here back then, so now I'm supposed to watch for respect of the PF guidelines. If mainstream physics of today will be laughed at tomorrow, well, that simply means that we can only discuss laughable matter on PF ; such are the rules here.

Your discussions seem to be welcome on sci.physics.research, which has a slightly less restrictive moderation policy. However, in your posts there, you often refer to your PF threads, which could become annoying for PF in the long run. PF is not going to become the website hosting all your arguments against quantum physics .

It would probably be wise to limit your more virulent exchanges to s.p.r.
The quantum physics section of PF is meant to be about discussions of standard quantum theory, including QFT and quantum optics. A bit of informed speculation around open questions can be tolerated. Not about why it is just a pile of misleading rubbish.

 

[nightlight]

And since you mentioned the subtraction of accidentals issue... let me quote from a nearly identical experiment to the Thorn/Beck et al experiment, that of http://users.icfo.es/Morgan.Mitchell/QOQI2005/DehlingerMitchellAJP2002EntangledPhotonsNonlocalityAndBellInequalitiesInTheUndergraduateLaboratory.pdf :

S=2.307 +/- 0.035

a violation of the Bell inequality by more than eight standard deviations. This result conclusively eliminates the HVTs, and is consistent with quantum mechanics. Also shown is the computed number of accidental coincidences, the average number of times that photons from two different downconversion events will arrive, purely by happenstance, within the coincidence interval t of each other. This background is small, nearly constant, and acts to decrease |S|. A finding of |S|>2 thus cannot be an artifact of the accidental background.

In other words, even in an undergraduate lab they are well aware of the critique of Bell tests as to the "accidentals" issue, and so they addressed it head on. I don't know why you local realists have so much trouble accepting something so simple. Accept the experimental evidence for what it is: conclusive by mainstream standards. When you have some mainstream evidence for your position, then we will be here to listen to it.

The accidentals are just one type of subtraction prescribed by the Glauber's counting (to extract the Gn()'s from the data). They can be traded off for other types of subtractions to to the point of being nearly completely absent.

These other types of events which must be excluded (via the non-local post-filtering on obtained data) to match the Glauber's "filtered correlation" Gn() are all cases of m triggers where m differs from n, as well as any cases of n triggers where the n triggers are not on the n distinct detectors. Generally, out of n^n terms describing perturbatively the full evolution of the system of n detectors in the EM field, the Gn() is a hand-picked selection of particular n! terms, which is approximately 1/e^n-th fraction of the full n detector dynamics (the equations that says what is happening on the n detectors).

In other words the Gn()'s don't describe what is happeneing with the n detectors but merely what can be subsampled from among all the events using the Glauber's non-local filtering procedure (which, of course, invalidates it for any comparisons or use in Bell inequalities which are purely set-theoretical/enumerative constraints, a la pigeonhole principle). In other words, the theory (QED/QO) doesn't predict any "ideal" case where these subtractions could be made negligible. The rest of the events (being necessarily discarded from the set of all samples) is always substantially more numerous than the filtered fraction of samples kept.

All these subtractions have nothing to do with the technological limitations of detectors -- they are fundamental to the Glauber's definition of Gn() (which is the QED/QO technique to derive predictions for these coincidences). And that is just the first key problem (of the two discussed in the posts cited earlier) with the 'QO sleight of hand' in presenting their results.

I gave you links to more detaled descriptioon and discussion with references to relevant papers (such as Glauber's and Ou & Mandel's papers) and I don't intend to dance in a circle with you around the square one on every post. You don't show even the slightest indication of any familiarity with the subject discussed or references cited.

I am sure, though, that there is place on the whole internet where the psychological, psychiatric and social aspects of physics, which seem to be the only kind of topic you wish to talk about, are being discussed and where you wisdom would be appreciated. Unfortunately, as hinted before, I have a bit of a wooden ear for such topics, so you may be throwing the proverbial 'margaritas ante porcos'. It would be a terrible tragedy to waste here on me all those pearls of wisdom which must be, I am sure, hiding somewhere in your writing.