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The Electron Between Wave and Particle

المؤلف:  Will Raven

المصدر:  Atomic Physics for Everyone

الجزء والصفحة:  p-17

2026-11-10

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Fig. 1. Experimental results of a double-slit experiment with electrons. Image Credit: Dr. Tonomura and Belsazar from Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

A careful reader might have noticed something odd about Fig. 1. While there was clearly a wave interference pattern, this wave interference is composed of tiny bright dots. The electrons are moving through the slits as waves. However, we have experimentally found that when the electron hits the screen, which is often called a measurement, the electron wave “collapses” to a single point. You may have heard the phrases “wavefunction collapse” or “waveparticle duality”. This is a fancy way of saying that the electron behaves like a wave until something interacts with it before it starts behaving like a particle (i.e. a single point on the screen). The amplitude of the wave interference tells us the probability of where the wave collapses back to a point. Thus where the electron wave destructively interferes on the screen produces 0 probability that the particle will be detected at that point. The process of going from a wave to a point is a fascinating and yet unexplained phenomenon! There are many physicists and philosophers who think very hard about how this “collapse” occurs..., which is often called the orthodox or Copenhagen interpretation...