Tag Info

Accepted

Failure of Newton's corpuscular theory and success of photon theory of light

The corpuscular theory was opposed to the wave theory, and was rejected when diffraction experiments confirmed the wave theory. The blackbody spectrum also confirmed the wave theory at low frequencies,...
• 3,239

Why is Equation of State of Photon gas different from the Equation of State of Boson gas?

The equation $p = 2u/3$, where $u$ is kinetic energy density, is true for any non-relativistic, non-interacting, point-like particles, whether they be spin 1 bosons or spin 1/2 fermions. Your first ...
• 110k

Failure of Newton's corpuscular theory and success of photon theory of light

As an example, when using the corpuscular theory refraction of light and Snell’s Law is predicted using Newtonian Mechanics but a requirement of the theory is that the speed of light in glass is ...
• 77k
Accepted

Why is Equation of State of Photon gas different from the Equation of State of Boson gas?

Photons are indeed bosons (spin 1), and from what I can see in the book all the formulas are written for a classical system of bosons. Photons are massless relativistic particles,so when you try to ...
• 118

Doubt on photoelectric effect

You are confusing the energy of a single photon with the energy of the light beam. Increasing the intensity of light (while keeping the frequency $f$ constant) does not increase the energy per photon, ...
• 25.7k

What gives particles mass? Also why are particles like photons considered massless when they have energy and momentum?

The idea that a photon is massless is a pedagogic convention, that has not always held sway. When I was taught special relativity in the '70s, there were two kinds of mass that were distinguished. ...
• 2,696

Does a photon have a minimum energy level, below which it disappears?

Lorentz invariance implies that a photon can have any amount of energy. In particular, if a photon has the four-momentum $(E, E, 0, 0)$ (that is, it travels in the direction of the positive x-axis) ...
• 4,595

What gives particles mass? Also why are particles like photons considered massless when they have energy and momentum?

Mass is energy that a particle has when it is at rest. Photons are never at rest, and so don't have mass. A related fact is that in the limit that the photon's momentum goes to zero, its energy also ...
• 33.3k

Will 'free' photons exert gravitational force

Do photons have gravity according to GR? A (classical) electromagnetic field has an associated stress-energy tensor all by itself. See wikipedia. The question of whether and how individual photons ...
• 8,398

Are gamma rays the limit of the frequency photons can attain, and if yes, why?

Which Universal factor imposes this limit of electromagnetic radiation, and what is it called? In the table here for the electromagnetic spectrum the energy of a gamma rays is given in megahertz ...
• 221k
Accepted

Are gamma rays the limit of the frequency photons can attain, and if yes, why?

Gamma rays doesn't impose any frequency limit as per definition, because gamma rays just means electromagnetic waves which have frequency $\gt 10^{18}~\text{Hz}$. Upper frequency limit is imposed by ...
• 7,202

Phonon, photon have chemical potential equal to zero

The number of modes of the phonons is $3N$. However, for each mode, the number of phonons is not conserved. An analog is that we have $3N$ different harmonic oscillators, and each of them can be in a ...
• 1,446
Accepted

How Chadwick concluded that the particles are neutrons but not photons?

The WP article I linked summarizes that In 1931, Walther Bothe and Herbert Becker found that if alpha particle radiation from polonium fell on beryllium, boron, or lithium, an unusually penetrating ...
• 47.2k
Accepted

How do retinal cones see color when the cones pickup photons and not waves?

The interaction between photons and chemistry, eg, via atomic orbitals of single atoms, is a classic tool for understanding quantum mechanics, so there shouldn't be any surprises that the absorbing ...
• 2,735
1 vote

• 24.8k
1 vote

Why the emitted photon has exactly the same energy,phase and direction as the incident photon in stimulated emission?

the emission is triggered by an incident photon. assumes emission photon has equal energy. Now when electrons fall back to low energy EM wave emitted if we relate this emission due to electron ...
1 vote

How does stimulated emission work, exactly?

I just don't understand one thing, if photons carry energy, shouldn't the electron be forced to higher excited states? This typically does not happen because the photon usually considered when ...
• 1,600
1 vote

What are electromagnetic fields made of?

The most fundamental thing in physics, is the way that we conduct phyiscs. And physics will be as good as we are conducting it. We conduct physics by using 1) logic and 2) the scientific method. In ...
• 35

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible