I read a lot that the 'photon' concept is overapplied and it makes more sense to think of light waves, even in cases where there is an discrete effect (e.g. photoelectric effect).
I can see this makes sense in terms of a bright light or strong radio source: you'd get a broad spectrum of waves, and if you had a fast/high-resolution enough detector you might even see interference fringes
But how should we think about single quanta being emitted from an atom undergoing a transition? Is it a spherical wave, or a wave packet over some solid angle and radial extent? Does it spread out? Is there some kind of 'wavefunction collapse consistency' where a single interaction between the wave and a particle at some point X collapses the wavefunction so that it cannot interact with another atom Y somewhere else?
Just curious what people's mental models are!
