This is a timeline of subatomic particle discoveries, including all particles thus far discovered which appear to be elementary (that is, indivisible) given the best available evidence. It also includes the discovery of composite particles and antiparticles that were of particular historical importance.
This blog tells the story of the early days of the photon and of quantum optics. It begins with Einstein in 1905 and ends with the demonstration of photon anti-bunching that was the first fundamentally quantum optical phenomenon observed seventy years later in 1977. Across that stretch of time, the photon went from a nascent idea in Einstein''s fertile brain to the most thoroughly investigated quantum particle in the realm of physics.
When Planck presented his quantum hypothesis in 1900 to the German Physical Society [1], his model of black body radiation retained all its classical properties but one—the quantized interaction of light with matter. He did not think yet in terms of quanta, only in terms of steps in a continuous interaction.
The quantum break came from Einstein when he published his 1905 paper proposing the existence of the photon—an actual quantum of light that carried with it energy and momentum [2]. His reasoning was simple and iron-clad, resting on Planck''s own blackbody relation that Einstein combined with simple reasoning from statistical mechanics. He was led inexorably to the existence of the photon. Unfortunately, almost no one believed him (see my blog on Einstein and Planck).
This was before wave-particle duality in quantum thinking, so the notion that light—so clearly a wave phenomenon—could be a particle was unthinkable. It had taken half of the 19th century to rid physics of Newton''s corpuscules and emmisionist theories of light, so to bring it back at the beginning of the 20th century seemed like a great blunder. However, Einstein persisted.
In 1909 he published a paper on the fluctuation properties of light [3] in which he proposed that the fluctuations observed in light intensity had two contributions: one from the discreteness of the photons (what we call "shot noise" today) and one from the fluctuations in the wave properties. Einstein was proposing that both particle and wave properties contributed to intensity fluctuations, exhibiting simultaneous particle-like and wave-like properties. This was one of the first expressions of wave-particle duality in modern physics.
In 1916 and 1917 Einstein took another bold step and proposed the existence of stimulated emission [4]. Once again, his arguments were based on simple physics—this time the principle of detailed balance—and he was led to the audacious conclusion that one photon can stimulated the emission of another. This would become the basis of the laser forty-five years later.
While Einstein was confident in the reality of the photon, others sincerely doubted its existence. Robert Milliken (1868 – 1953) decided to put Einstein''s theory of photoelectron emission to the most stringent test ever performed. In 1915 he painstakingly acquired the definitive dataset with the goal to refute Einstein''s hypothesis, only to confirm it in spectacular fashion [5]. Partly based on Milliken''s confirmation of Einstein''s theory of the photon, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
From that point onward, the physical existence of the photon was accepted and was incorporated routinely into other physical theories. Compton used the energy and the momentum of the photon in 1922 to predict and measure Compton scattering of x-rays off of electrons [6]. The photon was given its modern name by Gilbert Lewis in 1926 [7].
The reason that there is no single-photon-limit deviation in the behavior of the Young double-slit experiment is because Young''s experiment only measures first-order coherence properties. The average over many single-photon detection events is described equally well either by classical waves or by quantum mechanics. Quantized effects in the Young experiment could only appear in fluctuations in the arrivals of photons, but in Taylor''s day there was no way to detect the arrival of single photons.
The famous dialog between Einstein and Bohr at the Solvay Conferences culminated in the now famous “EPR” paradox of 1935 when Einstein published (together with B. Podolsky and N. Rosen) a paper that contained a particularly simple and cunning thought experiment. In this paper, not only was quantum mechanics under attack, but so was the concept of reality itself, as reflected in the paper’s title “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” [10].
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