[Physics] What does it mean “not to have a definite trajectory”

heisenberg-uncertainty-principlemeasurement-problemquantum mechanics

In a comment to my question someone stated the following:

"photons do not travel at some definite number of oscillations per
second. In fact, they do not "travel" at all, no more than electrons
or other quanta do, as by the Uncertainty Principle they don't have a
definite speed and/or trajectory
"

Nobody objected or denied it, can someone explain what that actually means?

  • Does it mean that they do not have a definite/straight/regular trajectory and they wander erratically or that they have none at all? Can you try to graphically describe their motion ?

It is generally thought that QM describes weird things, laws and phenomena that are quite different from macroscopic world, can you be precise about one feature, please, i.e if it respects the basic old tenet "Natura non facit saltus":

  • Does QM allow a particle to disappear from a point and reappear in another point that is not continuous to it? If so, what is the explanation?

Best Answer

A photon is a name given to a lump in an electromagnetic field that can cause a single electron to change from one energy level to another. The size of the lump in a given region tells you the probability that it will make an electron change its energy level. The first thing to note about such a lump is that it doesn't have a single location. Rather, it is spread over an extended region. Now, it can be the case that if you track the evolution of the field over time, a lump in some region R1 can give rise to another lump in some other region R2. But you can't pick a particular point x1 in R1 and say that the field at x1 gave rise to the field at a point x2 in R2. Rather, the lump in R1 gave rise to the lump in R2. If you change the shape of the lump in R1 away from x1 this will in general change the probability of observing something in a sub region of R2 around x2. So you can't say the photon travels along some trajectory from x1 to x2.

And what I have said above is only an approximation because in general you can't localise a field so that it only has a non-zero value in some bounded region. The best you can do is change the field so that you will have a higher probability of seeing a photon in some region.

The above discussion alone would mean that a photon doesn't have a trajectory, but in general the situation is even less trajectory friendly than that. Different photons with the same energy aren't distinguishable: all you can say is "there are so many lumps in the field in this region". If you have some region R3 at t2 and there are lumps in R1 and R2 at t1 both of which are within (t2-t1)/c of R3, then there is in general no fact of the matter about whether the lump at R3 corresponds to the lump at R1 or R2 since they both contribute to R3 and all you can measure is something like the number of lumps.

If you want to understand this issue properly you should read about quantum field theory. A good book about QFT is "Quantum field theory for the gifted amateur" by Lancaster and Blundell.

More explanation. The OP asks if the particle can be in two places at once. Suppose that the field in a particular region is such that you have a very high probability of only measuring one particle in some given period of time. In general you will not be able to explain the results of experiments in that region by saying the particle has gone down one particular trajectory. Changes in different places in that region will all change the final outcome of the experiment. You could say the particle is in more than one place at a time in that sense. The particle doesn't appear or disappear from one place or another in the region. Rather, the field changes gradually over time so that the particle changes its probability of being in different places.