Quote Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage View Post
Didn't know what to expect but I was hoping to actually see what would be a photon.
Heh... well... err I guess it would look like a flash of color about the size of the photon's wavelength? I don't think you'll do any better than this. And that's assuming a not-too narrow wave packet, which determines the probability of finding the photon in any particular place in space. If the wave packet is really, really narrow, there's a probability distribution of wavelengths... so I guess a wavelength with high probability would be "chosen" from among these when you measure it.

The length of the flash is probably determined by the spectral resolution of your instrument, i.e. by how well it can measure the energy of the photon. I would think the better the resolution, the shorter the flash of light. The exact energy of the photon you see is determined in the same way the wavelength is, since the wavelength of light in free space is exactly determined by the photon's energy and vice-versa.


In reality, with real instruments, what the photon "looks" like is more determined by the time and space resolution of your instrument than anything else.


But regardless, it would probably just look like a boring, single, very fast flash. But if you performed many measurements of these single flashes that are all prepared the same way, you can reconstruct the wave function of the single photons, which is very interesting. I think, however, you can do this with many photons at once just as well as with photon at a time, since photons like to bunch up together.

There is interest in making single photon with particular wave functions, for experiments where you just want to affect a system by a single photon at a time.