- #1
Drakkith
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
2022 Award
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Are particles considered to be standing waves? Or only in certain situations such as an electron in its atomic/molecular orbital?
No and no. <sees who it is> ohai.
You are thinking of deBroglie matter waves - in that model, then you can model electrons in a stationary state in terms of a dB standing wave. However, this model seems to have been pretty much discarded.
QM particles are not classical particles.
The "wave" performance is statistical in nature.
You know this.
There is a tendency to talk about the wavefunction and the particle being the same thing in wave-mechanics ... in this case the particle is "built up" from a superposition of stationary (basis) states. But one particle does not a wave make any more than cats exhibit wave-like properties.
I'm sure we've both been in discussions of "wave-particle duality" before.Not really, my knowledge of QM is far under what I wish it were.
Depends on the situation - sometimes it is better to model a beam as a set of plane-wave states.So you would take an large/infinite number of different stationary waves and add them together to achieve the wave function?