In quantum physics experiments, how is their equipment fine-fingered enough to experiment on individual particles? For example in the double slit experiment, how were they shooting exactly a single electron at a time?
In: Physics
In quantum optical labs I’ve seen experiments done it’s all probabilistic (as are most things in quantum), the emitter is designed such that most of the time it doesn’t even fire a photon, rarely fires one and in extremely rare cases, fires two. This makes it easier to be sure that when you do get a result, it was exactly one photon. When it was more than one, there is generally some indication and so you can omit those from your final data. Electrons are probably easier as they are bigger, but my university specialized in optics so I didn’t see any electron setups.
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