Sunday, December 21, 2008

Subtracting Photons From Arbitrary Light Fields: Experimental Test of Coherent State Invariance by Single-Photon Annihilation

This is such a cool experimental verification. They managed to remove single photons from light and demonstrated one of the predictions of Roy Glauber many years ago, that such removal does not destroy the coherence of the other photons within the light beam.

You can read a review of the paper in this PhysicsWorld article, or you can read the paper directly, thanks to New Journal of Physics open journal policy.

While this is certainly a wonderful result that is another experimental verification of QED, what astounds me even more is the fact that they could do these things. This is not something simple, ladies and gentlemen, not only in executing it, but in the ability to think about how to do it. I am always in awe of such ability.

Zz.

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