The Antiphoton

[Mystery111]

http://www.physorg.c...s155386974.html

 

 

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0104062

http://arxiv.org/PS_...4/0104062v1.pdf

Edited August 31, 2011 by Mystery111

[swansont]

I don't see a claim in the summary or the ArXiv papers that fewer than zero photons are detected. Perhaps I simply missed it.

[Mystery111]

You said you were not familiar with the experiment, so i cited some papers and an extra report on the subject. I'd like it known, that the authors don't actually believe that there experiment predicts antiphotons, but they are quick to surmize that all of the evidence points to the existence of antiphotons. But their work probably would not touch on this in their paper most likely, as they are reported saying ''our results are proposterous''. The Economist did report them saying however their experiments predicted an antiphoton, the exact evidence for that isn't tied in the papers as far as I know. I think it is very possible though the editor of the Economist has played down some technical terms (as they always do) - terminology like ''photons was actually less than zero'' is somewhat dubious.

[swansont]

You said you were not familiar with the experiment, so i cited some papers and an extra report on the subject. I'd like it known, that the authors don't actually believe that there experiment predicts antiphotons, but they are quick to surmize that all of the evidence points to the existence of antiphotons. But their work probably would not touch on this in their paper most likely, as they are reported saying ''our results are proposterous''. The Economist did report them saying however their experiments predicted an antiphoton, the exact evidence for that isn't tied in the papers as far as I know. I think it is very possible though the editor of the Economist has played down some technical terms (as they always do) - terminology like ''photons was actually less than zero'' is somewhat dubious.

(emphasis added)

No, The Economist did not say that.

 

Yokota's paper on ArXiv does not mention antimatter. The experiment I had read about, Lundeen and Steinberg, explain what is meant in their experiment (emphasis added):

 

What is the meaning of the negative joint occupation? Recall that the joint values are extracted by studying the polarization rotation of both photons in coincidence. Consider a situation in which both photons always simul- taneously passed through two particular arms. When a polarization rotator is placed in each of these arms it would tend to cause their polarizations to rotate in a correlated fashion; when P was found to have 45º polarization, E would also be more likely to be found at 45º than −45º. Experimentally, we find the reverse – when P is found to have 45º polarization, E is preferentially found at −45º (and vice versa), as though it had rotated in the direction opposite to the one induced by the physical waveplate. As in all weak measurement experiments, a negative weak value implies that the shift of a physical “pointer” (in this case, photon polarization) has the opposite sign from the one expected from the measurement interaction itself.

 

So it means photons in the "wrong" polarization state, which is analogous to antimatter in the e-e+ experiment, AFAICT

 

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.4229

[Mystery111]

 

So it means photons in the "wrong" polarization state, which is analogous to antimatter in the e-e+ experiment, AFAICT

 

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.4229

 

This makes much sense, thank you.