So the thing that gets weird is that the heavier the particle is the more likely it is to interact with the slits themselves on the way through, in which case the wavefunction will collapse and it will seem to go through only one slit. Im not totally sure if double slit has been demonstrated with atoms but I do know it’s been done many times with electrons.
Comment on xkcd #3141: Mantle Model
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 9 hours agoAlso also: this isn’t just photons, everything is like this. It may not align with how we observe things on a microscopic scale, but this is fundamentally how the universe works.
Wow, I think this answered my first before I asked it. So yeah, I was wondering about that double slit experiment, I’ve seen it demonstrated with photons and visible light, but do the principles demonstrated by the experiment actually apply to other particles? In the right environments, do atoms behave similarly?
OboTheHobo@ttrpg.network 5 hours ago
vithigar@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
In theory yes, but once you have multiple particles interacting things get really complicated really fast and nice tidy interference patterns like in the double slit experiment become much less common.
All atoms are multiple particles at quantum scales, even a single hydrogen atom is comprised of four.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
And I imagine we don’t have great methods for manipulating subatomic particles… Quarks and such don’t have magnetic charges, they’re probably hard to control as well as probably unstable on their own. So as a result I’d wager it’s hard to run experiments with those.