Could I make this visible light M-Z interferometer at home?

Could I make a visible light M-Z interferometer at home that would demonstrate the wavicle nature of photons via self-interference?

I know that M-Z interferometers are hard to align, but if it proves difficult to align all of the components to the micrometer-ranges needed for working with visible light (is this correct?), could I use a medium such as glass to slow down certain beams such that they arrive at the second mirror at the same time, rather than trying to keep aligning my hardware to such ridiculous specs and overshooting every time?

More like nanometers. Visible light ranges from about 400 to 780 nm, give or take. 1 nanometer is 1/1,000,000th of a micron. Those are some tough tolerances to meet.

You can certainly make interferometers of all kinds, Mach-Zender included, at home. Edmund Scientific morphed into Edmund Industrial Optics several years ago, and you can buy mounts and stands from them.

You want a laser with a long coherence length, a good sturdy optical bench to put it on , and reliable , well-tied-down mounts. The essence of good interferometry is making everything good and stable and not subject to vibration.
It’
s the same with holography, which is the recording of an interference pattern as well. If you’re looking to set up an interferometer on the cheap, then, look up Fred Unterseher et al’s book Holography Handbook, which tells you how to use a sand box as an optical bench, and how to make stands and mounts out of PVC piping.

Really.

But The Edmunds stuff is better (Or see other optics suppliers – Newport, ThorLans, New Focusd, etc. Go to www.optics.org for info).

Make that 1/1000th. My fingers got zero happy.

By the way, an easy way to see visible light interference is to look at, say, oil films – that’s interference of white light with minimal path differences. Rainbows, too – they’re really diffractive phenomena, not primarily refractive, although few people realize this.

Or do the double-slit experiment, using a piece of smoked microscope slide glass and "cutting’ two parallel slits with razor blades through the carbon coat.

See a good book on experimental optics.

I don’t think that apparatus will do what you’re looking for it to do. It will demonstrate interference of light, and therefore light’s wave nature, but then, so will some much simpler experiments. It will not, so far as I can tell, demonstrate light’s particle nature, though there are other experiments which will do that (though I don’t know as much about the practicalities of setting those up).

A simple experiment to illustrate interference of light waves, which you likely can do at home: You’ll need a laser (a red laser pointer will work just fine), a metal ruler, with the finest scale somewhere in the millimeter range, and something to project spots onto (a white wall or some white pieces of paper will work fine). If you want to actually measure the wavelength, rather than just illustrating the existance of interference, you’ll also need some means of holding these components steadily in place relative to each other, and a meterstick or other similarly-sized measuring device (sticking them to a table with some play-doh should work fine).

The basic experiment is, you align the laser and the metal ruler (which will serve as a diffraction grating) so that the beam is grazing the millimeter scale on the ruler at a very small angle (a few degrees, or so). When you’re doing this correctly, there should be a long oval laser-spot spread out along the length of the ruler, over the millimeter scale. As you would expect from shining a laser onto something reflective, the beam will be reflected off of the ruler with angle of reflection equal to angle of incidence, and put a spot on the wall beyond the ruler. Except there won’t be only one spot: The one corresponding to specular (mirror-like) reflection will be the brightest, but there will be a line of other spots to one side (or possibly both sides) of that brightest spot. Using the spacing of those spots, the distance from the diffraction grating to the screen, and the spacing of the tick marks on the ruler, you can calculate the wavelength of the laser you’re using.

Yes, this would demonstrate what I’m trying to see but an M-Z interferometer, if operating at the quantum level, would demonstrate interference across a larger locality.

Is there not experiments that show that if you pass a photon through a beamsplitter in a setup that is very much like the interferometer I linked to such that it has a 50% chance to go through either path, then it will essentially go through both and interfere with itself at its destination? This would be different interference AFAIK from the type that would occur if light were a true wave.

If you’re using a particle model to begin with, then you have to say that each individual photon has a 50% chance to go through either path. But that’s assuming the conclusion: With a wave model, you can just say that the wave goes through both, with decreased amplitude, and get the same results. To prove that it’s a particle, you need to do something like the photoelectric effect experiment, to show that energy can only be absorbed in discrete quanta.

Now, once you have a particle model from experiments like the photoelectric effect, you can then construct one of the wave experiments with a very low intensity beam, such that you only have at most one photon in the apparatus at a time. Then you’re forced to conclude that that single photon is in some sense taking both paths and interfering with itself, and you get the quantum mechanical weirdness in its full glory. But you have to establish the particle nature, first.

Thanks. I hadn’t thought it through enough (too much of my patented Death Ray drink), and I should have realized that a wave model will self-interfere, no particle needed and that I would need to establish discrete detection.