I’m perfectly aware about the wave-particle duality of nature and therefore the difficulties of claiming what behaving like a particle is. This question is not about this very profound behavior of fundamental particles, thus, hereby I try to explain what I mean with that in present context. Here, an object behaves like a particle if when left free a) to interact with a screen it mostly produce a single small dot; b) if passing through a cloud chamber it leaves a clear path.
A good example of particle-like behavior is an electron in a cathode rays tube or a high energy electromagnetic photon. Obviously as was experimentally demonstrated, if a double-slit is had along the way of the objects a broad interference pattern will appear. This situation would account -as per current definition- as not being left free to interact.
The counter example would be an electromagnetic object at the radio wave-length. These objects will mostly behave as waves rather than photons.
Now, as a personal observation, it seems that almost all massive objects (electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.) tend to behave like particles in a broad range of energies (from rest to very high energies) with the same happening to almost all high-energy massless objects (mainly electromagnetic objects). It seems to me, that behaving as a particle is somehow associated to the objects energy (small mass=huge energy). So my questions are:
- Is the above observation true as a rule of thumb? If true, what are the exceptions to this, for example, a massive object or high energy massless objects that don’t follow the above rule, including gravitational waves or any other objects. Strange theoretical objects will be welcome.
- Is there a clear equation that gives a smooth transition between wave-like to particle-like behaviors as energy increases?
PS2: I found (this)1 and (this)2 questions here on the site. However, they are not what I’m looking for.
