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Physics
Quantum Physics
When are particles in a superposition of states?
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[QUOTE="PeroK, post: 6382999, member: 493650"] I don't think being in a superposition of states is relevant to the tunnelling effect demonstrated. I think you have quite a few questions in there. 1) A particle (or any quantum system) is always in a superposition of states. But, it is also always in a defined (possibly mixed) state. This is because any state can be expressed as a superposition of other states (in an infinite number of ways). You may have a system in an energy eigenstate (that's a well-defined state). But, that eigenstate may be a superposition of infinitely many position eigenstates. If you measure position, the state "collapses" to a position eigenstate, which is a superposition of energy eigenstates. Simplistically, a system is in an eigentstate of what you last measured; and that is a superposition of eigenstates of anything else you could measure. It's not either in a superposition or not. It's both at the same time. 2) What happens in large "macroscopic" system is best expained by decoherence. Rather than write about that here, I'll let you look it up. It's actually very difficult to describe in QM terms what is happening in "large" systems. 3) The behaviour of light is also not that easy to describe quantum mechanically. Feynman wrote a book called [I]QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter[/I]. That's definitely worth a read. [URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Light_and_Matter[/URL] [/QUOTE]
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Quantum Physics
When are particles in a superposition of states?
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