Wave-Particle Interference 3D
Send particles through a double slit one at a time and each arrives as a single dot — yet an interference pattern still builds up. This 3D simulation accumulates those hits so you can watch the pattern emerge from apparently random arrivals.
How to use this simulation
- Fire particles one at a time or in a stream
- Switch which-path detection on and off
- Rotate the 3D view of the accumulating pattern
What to look for
- Early hits look random, with no pattern visible at all
- Fringes emerge gradually as the count grows into the thousands
- Turning on which-path detection collapses the fringes into two plain bands
The physics behind it
Each particle is described by a probability amplitude that passes through both slits and interferes with itself. The square of that amplitude gives the probability of detection at each point, so the fringe pattern appears only after many particles land. Detecting which slit a particle used destroys the interference entirely — the pattern requires that the path stays genuinely undetermined.