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Re: Is photon a wave packet ?



On Wed, 15 May 2002, Roger Haar wrote:

One can experimentally measure the length of a single photon.

Isn't this a measurement of the length of a coherent wavetrain?

I thought that this coherence-length was caused by collisions in the gas
molecules which emit the light... as opposed to photons themselves having
a length.

If a molecule is being knocked about, then obviously can only emit an EM
wavetrain having a certain number of cycles (a certain length) before it's
output is suddenly Doppler-shifted during a collision.

Is my understanding screwy?

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