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If a photon has a wavelength and a frequency and we depict a graph with multiple hills and valleys like done in basically every explanation regarding photons and their wave/particle behavior, like in this one.

is it correct to say that one photon (as simplified as it is) is stretched from one hill to the next?

And multiple of those sections are either multiple photons behind each other (when the sun emits them) or the trail of one photon as a record in space or time(depending on what one wants to depict).

Or is one photon the entirety of those many hills and valleys?

My understanding is, that one photon is one part from hill to hill or valley to valley, depending on how you look at it.

banercat
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Lucas Szikszai
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  • You must have all the hills and valleys across the entire universe making up one photon. You need infinite periodicity in order to define the wavelength properly, see Fourier analysis. One photon is the minimum amplitude of the hills and valleys, not something you can confine to just between two consecutive hills. In practice, at least consider a huge box, and the photon would be a minimum amplitude excitation over the entire box, not any smaller. – naturallyInconsistent Sep 06 '23 at 16:15
  • your link is about electromagentic waves, classical electrodynamics. Photons belong to the quantum regime, and how photons build up light depends on quantum mechanical probability .my answer and links here may help https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/273032/what-exactly-is-a-photon/273180#273180 – anna v Sep 06 '23 at 16:25

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What you've described is a classical electro-magnetic wave with a certain frequency. To figure out how photons relate to this, you'll need to quantize the field, and deal with Fock states. Fock states are eigenstates of the photon number operator.

Since you're interested in a single particle state (ie. a state of the field with 1 photon), then this is the Fock state |1>.

The next question is, how does this |1> relate to the wave field you've described. Things get complicated here. The electro-magnetic field become operators of the raising and lowering operators. In the end, you can't attribute a single photon to a classical electro-magnetic field. Glauber coherent states are another way to express this.

Long story short, given a classical EM field with a definite frequency, you can't associate a single photon to it.

JQK
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