Timeline for Is the falling back to ground state of an electron what makes the electromagnetic wave, or is it the action of absorption AND falling down?
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| Oct 7, 2019 at 12:02 | comment | added | BjornW | @QuesoPez Everything is further complicate by the fact that a "photon" sometimes means a distant propagating wave-like photon (sort of a "semi-classical photon"), sometimes it means any perturbation in the EM field (often called a "virtual photon"). What we are talking about when we say "EM waves" is mostly then a photon with proper wave-like characters with a reasonably well-defined wavelength and reasonably spatiotemporally defined origin and destinations. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 11:59 | comment | added | BjornW | @QuesoPez Sorry for the late reply.. it's a bit difficult to answer such questions as it's a classical description while it's not "really" working like that. Photons, the EM carriers, are emitted and absorbed by charged particles all the time, but only some particle configurations over time generate photons that can propagate to a more distant place (an "EM wave"). In the schoolbook examples this is given for example when an electron is linearly accelerated, but it stops being a useful analogy further on I think (like in your original example with the electron transitions in an atom). | |
| Oct 1, 2019 at 15:18 | comment | added | Queso Pez | Sorry for the confusing preamble. This answered my question nicely! However, I do have a question: are electromagnetic waves caused ONLY by accelerating charges, or can they be created through other atomic methods? | |
| Sep 30, 2019 at 15:54 | history | answered | BjornW | CC BY-SA 4.0 |