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Wave-particle duality
- Like all other subatomic particles, photons exhibit wave-particle duality, meaning that sometimes they behave as tiny particles and sometimes they act as waves. Photons are massless, allowing them to travel at the speed of light in a vacuum (299,792,458 meters per second) and can travel an infinite distance.
www.livescience.com/what-are-photons
Mar 12, 2024 · Like the fully human and fully divine Jesus of Christian theology, a photon is supposed to be 100% wave and 100% particle. If a photon had a well defined path, then it would not demonstrate wave superposition and interference effects, contradicting its wave nature.
- 5.2: The Photoelectric Effect - Light as a Particle
A strange implication of this experiment is that light can...
- 5.2: The Photoelectric Effect - Light as a Particle
20 hours ago · Photon Applications. Lasers: Lasers work by emitting photons of the same energy, creating a focused beam of light. This technology is used in everyday devices like barcode scanners and printers and even in medical treatments such as eye surgery (e.g., LASIK). Photosynthesis: In plants, photons from sunlight are absorbed by chlorophyll and other ...
- Photon Discovery
- Are Photons particles?
- Do Photons Have Mass and Momentum?
- Do Photons Experience time?
- Are Photons Affected by Gravity?
- Additional Resources
- Bibliography
Although physicists have studied the nature of light for centuries, arguments went back and forth as to whether light was made of tiny particles or was wave-like in nature. In the late 1800s, however, the pioneering work of German physicist Max Planck changed the entire picture. Planck was studying something called blackbody radiation, or light fro...
Strictly speaking, photons are neither particles nor waves; they are a combination of both. In some situations, their particle-like nature comes out more, and in others, their wave-like nature is more apparent. For example, a detector can register the arrival of a single photon, which appears as a point-like particle. The process known as Compton s...
Photons have zero mass, which allows them to travel at the fastest possible speed in the universe, the speed of light. However, they do have energy and momentum. The energy of a photon is given by Planck's constant times the frequency of the light, and the momentum of a photon is given by Planck's constant times the frequency of the light times the...
Our understanding of the rate of the passage of time comes from Einstein's theory of special relativity, which states that objects traveling closer and closer to the speed of light will experience slower and slower rates of the passage of time. In other words, moving clocks run slowly, according to John D. Horton of the University of Pittsburgh. Ho...
Because photons have both energy and momentum, they are influenced by gravity. Under Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is our modern understanding of gravity, anything with any form of energy (including mass, momentum and torsion) is influenced by gravity. Specifically, massless particles, such as photons, follow "geodesics," which are...
You can dig deeper into the relationship between light and time in this YouTube videohosted by the author of this article, astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter.For a fun exploration of the nature of quantum mechanics (which, of course, also discusses photons), check out "How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog"(Scribner, 2010) by physicist Chad Orzel.The Physics Asylum also hosts a great video explainer on the nature of the photon, which you can watch here.Afework, B., Boechler, E., Campbell, A., Hanania, J., Heffernan, B., Jenden, J., Street, K., & Donev, J. (2021, October 22). Photon. Energy Education. https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Photon American Physical Society. (2005, January). This month in physics history: Einstein and the photoelectric effect. APS News. https://www.aps.org/publicat...
Like many other particles governed by quantum mechanics, photons have the characteristics of both waves and particles. Photons travel in a wave-like fashion, in which the local electric and magnetic field oscillates in intensity, regularly swinging back and forth between high and low energy levels.
Rather, the received photon acts like a point-like particle since it is absorbed or emitted as a whole by arbitrarily small systems, including systems much smaller than its wavelength, such as an atomic nucleus (≈10 −15 m across) or even the point-like electron.
Dec 10, 2023 · A strange implication of this experiment is that light can behave as a kind of massless "particle" now known as a photon whose energy \(E=h\nu\) can be transferred to an actual particle (an electron), imparting kinetic energy to it, just as in an elastic collision between to massive particles such as billiard balls.
We discuss how Albert Einstein extended Planck’s concept to a quantum of light (a “photon”) to explain the photoelectric effect. We also show how American physicist Arthur H. Compton used the photon concept in 1923 to explain wavelength shifts observed in X-rays.
