How is a scientist able to capture and observe something as impossibly small as a particle being fired at something else? The video I watched stated they do this to detect wave patterns.
In: Technology
Old fashioned vacuum tubes and CRT televisions and monitors do it all the time. Very bssically, a hot filament releases electrons (negatively charged) and they are attracted towards a metal electrode with a positive voltage on it. In the case of the TV tube, the electrode has a hole in it and some of the electrons go straight through and carry on to hit the inside of the screen where they make the picture. You can make beams of protons, alpha particles and other atomic nuclei and accelerate them with high negative voltages as they are positively charged.
All you need to do is pop off an electron to make a charged ion. Then you can use magnetic fields to hold it and electric fields to accelerate it. (This is of course really hard, but I’ve oversimplified for ELI5.)
If you’re talking about a slit experiment, that’s likely detecting the wave pattern through some sort of charged particle detector.
Whenever you hear scientists “firing” particles, what they mean in practice is that they have a beam consisting of billions and billions of those particles.
But they are still investigating effects caused by individual particles interacting by using statistics, so it makes sense to talk about firing “individual particles” from a purely descriptive point of view.
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