{"id":170178,"date":"2023-08-21T21:24:24","date_gmt":"2023-08-22T02:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/physicists-use-a-350-year-old-theorem-to-reveal-new-properties-of-light-waves"},"modified":"2023-08-21T21:24:24","modified_gmt":"2023-08-22T02:24:24","slug":"physicists-use-a-350-year-old-theorem-to-reveal-new-properties-of-light-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/physicists-use-a-350-year-old-theorem-to-reveal-new-properties-of-light-waves","title":{"rendered":"Physicists use a 350-year-old theorem to reveal new properties of light waves"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Since the 17th century, when Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens first debated the nature of light, scientists have been puzzling over whether light is best viewed as a wave or a particle\u2014or perhaps, at the quantum level, even both at once. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have revealed a new connection between the two perspectives, using a 350-year-old mechanical theorem\u2014ordinarily used to describe the movement of large, physical objects like pendulums and planets\u2014to explain some of the most complex behaviors of light waves.<\/p>\n

The work, led by Xiaofeng Qian, assistant professor of physics at Stevens and reported in the August 17 online issue of Physical Review Research<\/i>, also proves for the first time that a light wave\u2019s degree of non-quantum entanglement exists in a direct and complementary relationship with its degree of polarization. As one rises, the other falls, enabling the level of entanglement to be inferred directly from the level of polarization, and vice versa. This means that hard-to-measure optical properties<\/a> such as amplitudes, phases and correlations\u2014perhaps even these of quantum wave systems\u2014can be deduced from something a lot easier to measure: light intensity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve known for over a century that light sometimes behaves like a wave, and sometimes like a particle, but reconciling those two frameworks has proven extremely difficult,\u201d said Qian \u201cOur work doesn\u2019t solve that problem\u2014but it does show that there are profound connections between wave and particle concepts not just at the quantum level<\/a>, but at the level of classical light-waves and point-mass systems.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the 17th century, when Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens first debated the nature of light, scientists have been puzzling over whether light is best viewed as a wave or a particle\u2014or perhaps, at the quantum level, even both at once. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have revealed a new connection between the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}