Photons act in freaky ways that remind us that nothing is as it seems at the smallest scales and most fundamental levels of existence.Photons are the smallest possible bits of electromagnetic energy and are massless, allowing them to travel at the speed of, well, light.Yet these feats may be their least fascinating properties because they also exhibit wave-particle duality, behaving both like waves and particles depending on how they're measured – as shown in Thomas Young's famous 19th-century double-slit experiment.Further probing this wave-like duality, physicists from the University of Oslo (UiO) explored a question that has never been asked before: what happens when you try to cut a photon in two, like lopping off the ickily oxidized end of an overripe banana?"Surprisingly, we will find that a truncated photon is a complicated state involving photon numbers up to infinity," the researchers say."In other words, by 'cutting away part of the photon' with a shutter, we effectively create a bunch of new photons."Of course, since a photon is an elementary particle, it cannot actually be cut in half, unlike an oxygen-browned banana.So the researchers calculated what would happen if one were to remove an optical shutter – basically a mirror – while it's in the act of reflecting a photon.A photon approaching an optical shutter, or mirror, from the left, and being reflected back. (Rukan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2026) Instead of creating two photons traveling in opposite directions, removing the mirror may produce many photons, or a quantum quirk known as superposition, in which photons exist in multiple states simultaneously.When measured, this quantity can theoretically end up being any number of photons: either zero, a few, or a bunch, up to an infinite amount.But could one really generate infinite photons, either in theory or in practice?"There is a common misunderstanding about this work. When truncating the photon by removing the mirror, the expected number of produced photons is not infinite." Johannes Skaar, a theoretical physicist at UiO and one of the study's co-authors, told ScienceAlert."If the mirror is removed slowly, the number is small; if it is removed quickly, the number is large."But the expected number is never infinite – that would have required infinitely fast mirror removal, which is not possible."Indeed, the probability of measuring a large number of photons decreases if the mirror is removed slowly.