Researchers say they have slowed light to a dead stop, stored it and then released it as if it were an ordinary material particle.
12.
By " formal analogy ", the wavefunction of a material particle can be used to find the probability density by taking its absolute-value squared.
13.
Here we are concerned with gauge fields, which mediate the forces between material particles, the simplest example of which would be the electromagnetic gauge potential.
14.
Their analysis was crucial to showing that the limitations and physical implications of the uncertainty principle apply to all dynamical systems, whether fields or material particles.
15.
Remarkably, the uncertainty principle for charged, material particles " requires " the quantization of light into photons, and even the frequency dependence of the photon's energy and momentum.
16.
Using Duane's 1923 hypothesis, the old quantum theory and the de Broglie relation, linking wavelengths and frequencies to energy and momenta, gives an account of diffraction of material particles.
17.
In its place, Harman proposes a concept of substances that are irreducible to both material particles and human perception, and " exceed every relation into which they might enter ."
18.
As a collection of classical material particles, temperature is a measure of the mean energy of motion, called kinetic energy, of the particles, whether in solids, liquids, gases, or plasmas.
19.
Just as the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution is the unique maximum entropy energy distribution for a gas of material particles at thermal equilibrium, so is Planck's distribution for a gas of photons.
20.
Photons in this context do not collide with one another, and so heat transport by electromagnetic radiation is conceptually distinct from heat conduction by microscopic diffusion and collisions of material particles and phonons.
