[General] Articles of interest

[John Williamson]

Dear David and everyone,
Sounds as though MIT does a bit of a better job of promoting itself than I do (what a surprise!).
There is nothing much new in looking at single electrons. SLAC was doing this for years in HEP with its linear accelerator.  For that matter Millikan was sensitive to single electrons with his oil-drop experiment – and the school I went to was enlightened enough to let me do this experiment myself at the age of sixteen or so. What is marvelous is that they can make it sound as though detecting one electron something sexy! Robert Hadfield (in our group) is in the business of detecting single photons and John Weaver (in our group) has huge capability to look at individual electrons with some of his work as well. This stuff is widely published!
More important than looking at detecting single electrons (easy enough!) is looking at the underlying  sub-electron structure. Back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s I was in the business of looking at just that. I designed a single electron electrometer sensitive at down to about a thousandth of the electron charge. If you look at my Google scholar page you can find several papers related to this. The device could also be used as a single electron pump, to deliver a stream of electrons phase locked to the frequency of a varying gate potential.  My paper (see attached), looking at the electron sub-structure delivered electrons one-at-a-time and probe the profile of the individual electron wave-function with a resolution of better than a tenth of its de Broglie wavelength. This experimental work did not stop when I left the field of course. Leo Kouwenhoven, in particular, spent many years investigating my single-electron electrometer device (and creating new ones) in the last quarter of a century. There is now a very great deal of experimental information about the inner structure of matter, electrons (and photons) with which to work.
What was lacking then, and is still not widely accepted now, is a proper theoretical framework within which to interpret this inner structure. This is what we have to do. Firstly develop the theoretical framework and secondly get the message out.
We have to convince people we are not crazies and that this is serious, new science. That is what will be hard. Any communications of this to the outside world needs to get rid of the speculative , ill informed, or just plain wrong stuff that is perfectly ok within the context of an online discussion or over a pint or two, but not ok at all if we wish to make a serious attempt at convincing the outside world.
Regards, John.
________________________________
From: General [general-bounces+john.williamson=glasgow.ac.uk at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] on behalf of David Mathes [davidmathes8 at yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 11:11 PM
To: Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion
Subject: [General] Articles of interest

Science moves on...two articles of interest for the discussion.

Detecting a single electron
https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/magnetic-system-detects-single-electrons-0421


Detecting photons on the fly
http://spie.org/x113450.xml





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