Seminars & Colloquia Calendar

Abstract: In 1932 physicist Charles G. Darwin wrote the following: "The Compton effect, at its discovery, was regarded as a simple collision of two bodies, and yet the detailed discussion at the present time involves the idea of the annihilation of one photon and the simultaneous creation of one among an infinity of other possible ones. We would like to be able to treat the effect as a two-body problem, with the scattered photon regarded as the same individual as the incident, in just the way we treat the collisions of electrons." In this talk I will describe my joint work with Michael Kiessling and Matthias Lienert, in which we realize Darwin's dream in one space dimension.  This is achieved through a certain relativistic extension of the framework proposed by deBroglie and later by Bohm and relies on our ability to describe not just the electron, but also the photon, as a point particle whose motion is guided by a quantum mechanical wave function.