Then the waveform interacts with the sheet and causes a specific particle of the sheet it to eject a photon. Is that collapse?
The waveform interacts with the sheet such that a small part of many many different parts of the sheet interact, and only exactly one in each case. Since it’s fluorescent, and not simply reflective, the time scale of the rerelease is finely dependent on local details, and going to wash out any reasonable interference pattern anyway.
This means that it is thermodynamically unlikely for these different components to ‘come back together’ so they could interfere. That’s also when it loses its long-range correlations, which is the mathematical criterion for decoherence.
Due to the baggage, I personally avoid the term ‘collapse’, but if you’re going to use it, then it’s attached to the process of decoherence. Decoherence can be gradual, while ‘collapse’ sounds abrupt.
A partially decoherent system would be one where you have a coherent signal passing repeatedly around a mirror track. Each lap, a little bit of the signal gets mixed due to imperfections in the mirrors. The beam becomes decreasingly coherent.
So, where in there is a collapse? Eh. It would be misleading to phrase the answer that way.
The waveform interacts with the sheet such that a small part of many many different parts of the sheet interact, and only exactly one in each case. Since it’s fluorescent, and not simply reflective, the time scale of the rerelease is finely dependent on local details, and going to wash out any reasonable interference pattern anyway.
This means that it is thermodynamically unlikely for these different components to ‘come back together’ so they could interfere. That’s also when it loses its long-range correlations, which is the mathematical criterion for decoherence.
Due to the baggage, I personally avoid the term ‘collapse’, but if you’re going to use it, then it’s attached to the process of decoherence. Decoherence can be gradual, while ‘collapse’ sounds abrupt.
A partially decoherent system would be one where you have a coherent signal passing repeatedly around a mirror track. Each lap, a little bit of the signal gets mixed due to imperfections in the mirrors. The beam becomes decreasingly coherent.
So, where in there is a collapse? Eh. It would be misleading to phrase the answer that way.