If You Remove a Mirror While a Photon Is Reflecting, It Somehow Makes Infinite Photons

Key Points:

• Physicists from the University of Oslo investigated what happens when attempting to "cut" a photon in two, revealing that truncating a photon creates a complex quantum state involving potentially infinite photon numbers rather than simply splitting it.
• By removing an optical shutter (mirror) while reflecting a photon, the process can produce a superposition state where photons exist in multiple states simultaneously, with the expected photon count varying based on how quickly the mirror is removed.
• The expected number of photons produced is never infinite; slow removal yields fewer photons, while rapid removal increases the count, but infinitely fast removal is impossible in practice.
• The study also highlights that vacuum energy can be converted into real photon energy during this process, and that photon truncation is feasible experimentally due to the long wavelengths of narrow-band photons.
• Observations show a surprising spatial effect where one side of the mirror appears to have a single photon, the other side has none, and a complicated mixture state exists in between, emphasizing the complex nature of photon behavior at quantum scales.