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CRC Press eBooks

Light and Optics

Andrew Rex

Published Feb 12, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

You’ve also seen that the electromagnetic wave alone is insucient to describe how light behaves (Chapter 4). Rather, light consists of small quanta of energy called photons. In carefully designed experiments, individual photons can be detected and counted. A complete view of light includes both waves and particle-like photons, and we are left to contemplate the resulting waveparticle duality.

DOI
10.1201/b16515-9

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You’ve also seen that the electromagnetic wave alone is insucient to describe how light behaves (Chapter 4). Rather, light consists of small quanta of energy called photons. In carefully designed experiments, individual photons can be detected and counted. A complete view of light includes both waves and particle-like photons, and we are left to contemplate the resulting waveparticle duality.
Light has long been perceived as a wave, or more specifically as an EM wave, and this is valid with respect to everyday observations. However, experiments involving light have produced surprising results that fall outside the realm of the wave nature of light. These experiments for the first time necessitated that light not be perceived as a wave but more like a particle. Some of these observations include photoelectric, Compton, and two-photon effects. In these experiments, light behaves more as an object filling a space just like a particle rather than a continuous entity like a wave. This is surprising given what we have learned in classical optics. In this chapter, we intend to analyze and understand the particle nature of light and its consequences.
Classically light is treated as an electromagnetic wave, or more precisely, a superposition of many waves each with an amplitude and phase. In reality however, light is composed of tiny indivisible quanta of energy called photons. The oldest of these flavors that humanity has known since its inception is thermal light. Thermal light is formed by random thermal motions of charges in a material. If this material is in thermodynamic equilibrium the radiation is called blackbody radiation and can be described by Planck’s law. Common examples of thermal radiation include sunlight, incandescent bulb emission, infrared radiation emitted by animals, and the cosmic microwave background radiation. Quantum dots are nanometer-sized semiconductor particles whose optical and electronic properties, due to quantum confinement in all three directions, differ from those of larger particles. Color Centers are defects in wide bandgap crystals in which the defect has atom-like energy levels in the bandgap of the material.
Newton thought that light was made up of particles, but then it was discovered, as we have seen here, that it behaves like a wave. Later, however (in the beginning of the twentieth century) it was found that light did indeed sometimes behave like a particle. Historically, the electron, for example, was thought to behave like a particle, and then it was found that in many respects it behaved like a wave. So it really behaves like neither. Now we have given up. We say: “it is like neither.” ere is one lucky break, however-electrons behave like light. e quantum behaviour of atomic objects (electrons, protons, neutron, photons, and so on) is the same for all, they are all ‘particle waves’ or whatever you want to call them.
Classical electromagnetics in free space leaves no room for accommodation of a light particle. To underline this, it is sufficient to remember that Einstein in order to reach his lightquantum (energy-quantum) hypothesis had to mix classical theoretical physics with a piece of experimental information that defies description in classical terms. In his 1905-paper Einstein concluded [60]:Monochromatic radiation of low density (within the range of validity of Wien’s radiation formula) behaves thermodynamically as though it consisted of a number of mutually independent energy quanta of magnitude hν. The introduction of light quanta in the Wien regime (the high-frequency part of the Planck blackbody radiation law) is the first step toward the concept of electromagnetic radiation as a Bose gas of photons [180, 39, 68, 69]. Although a photon gas obeys Bose-Einstein statistics for all frequencies the statistical independence assumed by Einstein in 1905 is not true in general. Einstein used Boltzmann statistics when he conjectured the existence of light quanta. In the Wien regime Boltzmann and Bose-Einstein statistics lead to the same conclusion since the mean number of particles (photons) with a given energy is much less than one. The circumstance that the light quanta are not statistically independent in Bose-Einstein counting finds its explanation in quantum mechanics. Hence, the statistical correlation is induced by the requirement of totally symmetric wave functions.