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I read a lot that the 'photon' concept is overapplied and it makes more sense to think of light waves, even in cases where there is an discrete effect (e.g. photoelectric effect).

I can see this makes sense in terms of a bright light or strong radio source: you'd get a broad spectrum of waves, and if you had a fast/high-resolution enough detector you might even see interference fringes

But how should we think about single quanta being emitted from an atom undergoing a transition? Is it a spherical wave, or a wave packet over some solid angle and radial extent? Does it spread out? Is there some kind of 'wavefunction collapse consistency' where a single interaction between the wave and a particle at some point X collapses the wavefunction so that it cannot interact with another atom Y somewhere else?

Just curious what people's mental models are!

Qmechanic
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Matt
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  • And if there's a book or other source for 'intuitive mental models for QM' (mental pictures of what's going on, without necessarily exact math), I'd love to know about it! – Matt Aug 26 '21 at 16:54
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    Does this answer your question? What exactly is a photon? – John Rennie Aug 26 '21 at 17:09
  • You can edit your question, no need to add extra details in the comments. – Mauricio Aug 26 '21 at 17:10
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    Also see Do photons truly exist in a physical sense or are they just a useful concept like $i = \sqrt{-1}$? – John Rennie Aug 26 '21 at 17:10
  • @JohnRennie I mean, not really -- I'm kind of just looking for a very rough 'visual mental simualtion' that gives roughly correct answers, rather than bunch of conceptual information that terminates with 'you have to understand QFT but even then you won't be able to understand real situations' – Matt Aug 26 '21 at 17:20
  • @JohnRennie the reason I think a viable 'visual mental model' exists is that I keep hearing people make an eloquently-written argument of "you'll never understand it but you can compute it with QFT, and there isn't a nice macroscopic picture"-- and then you get a steady stream of very clear and intuitive blog posts saying "actually you can completely understand it with a visual picture" e.g. http://marty-green.blogspot.com/2014/12/wave-function-collapse-explained-by.html which the community ends up agreeing with – Matt Aug 26 '21 at 17:25

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