Friday, August 19, 2016

"People Can Detect Flashes of Light as Feeble as a Single Photon..."

From David Castelvecchi's 7-19-16 Nature article entitled "People Can Sense Single Photons": 

"People can detect flashes of light as feeble as a single photon, an experiment has demonstrated — a finding that seems to conclude a 70-year quest to test the limits of human vision.

"The study, published in Nature Communications on 19 July, 'finally answers a long-standing question about whether humans can see single photons — they can!' says Paul Kwiat, a quantum optics researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The techniques used in the study also open up ways of testing how quantum properties — such as the ability of photons to be in two places at the same time — affect biology, he adds.

"'The most amazing thing is that it’s not like seeing light. It’s almost a feeling, at the threshold of imagination,' says Alipasha Vaziri, a physicist at the Rockefeller University in New York City, who led the work and tried out the experience himself."

To read the rest of Castelvecchi's article, click HERE.

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