Photons are electromagnetic waves. They exhibit particle-like qualities in many situations and have zero rest mass.
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How do particles become entangled?
A person asked me this and I'm just a lowly physical chemist.
I used a classical analogy (how good or bad is this and how to fix?)
Basically, light has a net angular momentum of zero, insofar as ...
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50 views
Is the de Broglie wavelength of a photon equal to the EM wavelength of the radiation?
Is the de Broglie (matter) wavelength $\lambda=\frac{h}{p}$ of a photon equal to the electromagnetic wavelength of the radiation?
I guess yes, but how come that photons have both a matter wave and an ...
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58 views
Where is the amplitude of electromagnetic waves in the equation of energy of e/m waves?
Does the amplitude of the photon oscillations always stay constant and if it is not - what are the physical differences between the photon with higher amplitude in comparison to the one with the less ...
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167 views
Frequency Of Light
I am confused on few topics...
What is meant by "Frequency of Light"? Does the Photon(s) vibrate, that is known as its frequency? If the Photons vibrate, then they have a specific frequency, then ...
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Quantum Mechanics proved incorrect. Bohr - Einstein debates concluded?
"Photons act like they go through two paths, even when we know which they took".
Please refer the above link and its conclusion.
I am an Engineer. What I infer from this is :-
This proves ERP.
...
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122 views
How fat is Feynman’s photon?
According to my calculations, it is a lot skinnier than Airy’s photon, but still a whole lot fatter than a straight line.
So, how does a photon get from point A to Point B?
The ray optics ...
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100 views
Quantum Electrodynamics
I was wondering if anyone could give a simple explanation of how light interacts with matter. From what I have read in QED, electrons will repel each other because of their ability to emit and ...
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42 views
Photon pumping in Laser
Let's consider a ring laser where the laser must pass through the gain material before it is sent toward a partially reflective surface $\ R=1-T $. The other mirrors are perfect reflectors with $\ ...
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211 views
How does one calculate the quantum propagator for a massless photon
So I want to calculate the quantum massless photon propagator. To do this, I write
$$
A_\mu(x) = \sum\limits_{i=1}^2 \int \frac{d^3p}{(2\pi)^3} \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\omega_p}} \left( \epsilon_\mu^i (p) ...
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33 views
Contact electricity and photoelectric effect
Most universities provide an experiment about the photoelectric effect to determine $h$ by measuring the stop voltage against the light frequency and calculating the slope $h/e$.
But mostly they also ...
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61 views
Conservation of Angular Momentum: atomic transitions vs exciton decay
I have a question about the role of photon angular momentum in two different sets of selection rules:
In atomic transitions within the dipole approximation, I've seen the selection rule as:
$\Delta ...
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60 views
Photons interact with themselves
We know that photons are the antiparticles of themselves and if they interact with each other through higher order process do they annihilate and again produce photons?
Here is the Phys.SE question ...
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40 views
How to make DIY flight detector for double slit experiment?
I want to reproduce double slit experiment. So, is it possible to build flight detector (situated near one slit) at home? Is it possible to buy it somewhere?
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47 views
Modeling the probability of a photodiode measuring photons targets at a neighbor
In current digital cameras, sensors are arrays of photodiodes which "transform" photons energy to electrons. I am aware that the probability of a photon to generate an electron is modeled by a Poisson ...
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242 views
Maxwell's Demon - laser cooling
There’s an interesting article on Scientific American
that tells how to cool individual atoms can bee cooled to within a very tiny fraction of Absolute Zero.
It uses two laser beams acting on a very ...
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54 views
Magnitude of a photon?
I encountered the following sentence in my textbook, which I don't quite understand, and after an unfruitful google search, I still can't figure out what they mean by magnitude in this context:
...
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13 views
How does optical phase modulation produce photons with different frequencies?
The classical description of electro-optic modulators is an index of refraction that depends on the applied voltage. For example, for a sine modulation $\sin(\Omega t)$, a monochromatic laser of ...
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33 views
Physical significance of effective wave function
In Yanhua Shih's book on quantum optics, the coherence functions are expressed in terms of effective wave function. Here are the expressions for single photon wave packets.
To derive the coherence ...
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39 views
Photon detection rate for pure / mixed states coming from single mode point source
Let the pure states be in superposition of horizontal and vertically polarized basis states. They are arriving at the point detector one at a time. So, a pure state is $|\Psi\rangle = \alpha|V\rangle ...
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47 views
Photons emitted by radioactive source
Can we calculate the number of photons emitted per second by a radioactive source (gamma) ?
we can take 100g of barium-133 as an example
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104 views
Polarization photon and Stokes parameters
I have the following situation: About the polarization of the photon, I introduce the basis:
Horizontal polarization $|\leftrightarrow>=\binom{1}{0}$
Vertical polarization ...
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0answers
100 views
Cross section of photoelectric absorption vs Thomson scattering cross section
I am interested in more less the same issue as asked here but my question is:
Why for the low X-rays the photoelectric absorption is dominant over Thomson/Compton scattering? I am considering the ...
