Engineering Physics Annotation << Back ANALYTICAL MODELING OF YOUNG’S SINGLE-PHOTON EXPERIMENT USING QUASICLASSICAL AND APPROXIMATE QUANTUM-MECHANICAL COORDINATE WAVE FUNCTIONS OF PHOTON A.P. DAVYDOV, T.P. ZLYDNEVA In many directions of photonics, an everincreasing role will obviously be given to the physical description of the interaction of photons with matter in the control, transmission, and detection of onephoton, twophoton, and multiphoton states, including entangled ones. An appropriate description requires taking into account various types of interference effects associated with these states. However, even in the simplest single-photon experiments equivalent to Young’s one, for example, with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, a quite complex apparatus for the second quantization of the electromagnetic field is used. In this article, Young's singlephoton mental experiment is explained using the coordinate photon wave function (PWF). This explanation is illustrated by specific examples of singlephoton states of certain wavelengths and duration of radiation within the framework of two approaches: quantum mechanical and “quasi-classical”. In the first approach, a 6-component coordinate PWF is constructed based on a spherically symmetric momentum distribution in a wave packet, followed by approximate analytical calculations. In the second approach, a onecomponent “quasi-classical” PWF is constructed, corresponding to electric dipole radiation. In both cases, the same pronounced interference pattern was obtained, which makes it possible to conclude that the coordinate PWF is capable of explaining the phenomena of one- and twophoton interference. This conclusion sheds light on the theoretical interpretation of the measurement of the coordinate PWF in some recent experiments. Keywords: two-photon interference, wave function, probability density, wave packet, quantum mechanics. DOI: 10.25791/infizik.9.2023.1357 Pp. 45-56.