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How Big Is a Photon and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
IN CHAPTER 5, WE LEARNED that a photon in an interferometer interferes with itself. In some sense, a photon can be in more than one place at a time. The photon location is described as a probability amplitude wave. This is not like a water wave, a sound wave, or even a classical electromagnetic wave. The wave associated with a photon (or other particles like electrons) describes the probability of finding the particle in some region of space. In the interferometer problem (Figures 3.4 and 5.1), a single photon was in leg 1 and leg 2 simultaneously, with equal probability of finding the photon in either of these regions of space. To understand and describe the location of a photon ...
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