antibunching
drorzel | August 20, 2010In my post about how we know photons exist, I make reference to the famous Kimble, Dagenais, and Mandel experiment showing "anti-bunching" of photons emitted from an excited atom. They observed that the probability of recording a second detector "click" a very short time after the first was small. This is conclusive evidence that photons are real, and that light has discrete particle-like character. Or, as I said in that post:
This anti-bunching effect is something that cannot be explained using a classical picture of light as a wave. Using a wave model, in which light is emitted as a…