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Photon Energy

Learn what a photon is and how to determine the energy of a photon as you explore the dual nature of light as both a wave and a particle, known as wave-particle duality. Uncover the concept of quantum mechanics, where light deposits energy in discrete amounts called photons. Investigate Planck's constant and how it relates to the energy of a photon. Created by David SantoPietro.

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  • leafers seedling style avatar for user Egle
    Photons are light particles because they exhibit particle like behavior. But are they actual/physical particles?
    (92 votes)
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    • male robot donald style avatar for user Christopher Hoffer
      Wave particle duality could better be understood by the fact that all particles on a quantum level are described by wave functions in order to describe their location, which we can't exactly know due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Because of the uncertainty, we must describe particles as a function of it's likely locations, so thusly the particles act like waves because we don't know their exact position and must describe them as waves. This is why we can see wave particle duality with things as large as bucky balls(60 Carbon atoms) in experiments such as the double slit experiment. To summarize, photons ARE particles that just show wave behaviour due to us having to describe them as wave functions due to uncertainty of their position. At least this is what I gather after reading QED from Feynman, but I won't pretend to understand anything (Neither did Feynman.)
      (28 votes)
  • leaf green style avatar for user Bryan Baker
    At David mentions Planck discovering this smallest, discrete amount of energy that light can deliver (6.626 x 10^-34 (J·s)). My question: how did Planck, in 1900 (!), quantify such a small quantity of energy?
    (41 votes)
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    • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user Waverly Gorman
      He calculated it by making the hypothesis that energy comes only in discrete packets (i.e. the photon). He uses this assumption to calculate the frequency distribution of black body radiation with his constant h being the separation between allowed frequency values and it exactly matched what was experimentally observed.
      (42 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user sungjun.lim
    Just out of curiosity.
    Light travels at different speeds in different medium.
    Can't we use medium that has extremely high n value to slow speed of light to a level that we can capture, photograph light photons and examine its properties little better?
    (39 votes)
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  • duskpin ultimate style avatar for user Asma Z
    'Energy cannot be created or destroyed' then where did all the initial energy in the big bang come from?
    (16 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user ben joe
    Can you give an example problem for E=hf?
    (5 votes)
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  • leaf blue style avatar for user Ifrah
    At , is frequency a measure of the wave (of light) frequency? If so, how does it fit with the idea that light is a particle? How is a particle supposed to have a frequency?
    (7 votes)
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    • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user Waverly Gorman
      Yes, frequency is a measure of the wave of light. This is ok with the understanding that light is a particle because all particles do have frequency. All of the particles in your body technically have wave like properties (frequency and wavelength). Check out the De Brogli wavelength: http://calistry.org/calculate/deBroglieEquation
      Ordinary particles have a wavelength so small that we can't see the oscillations (this is because ordinary particles have mass). Photons, on the other hand, do not have mass. Their nonexistent mass and high speed (speed of light, c) cancel out nicely to produce noticeable wave like behavior.
      (7 votes)
  • duskpin ultimate style avatar for user Rithwiq Nair
    Why is that Photons are known to be mass less? But at the same time it has MOMENTUM? Then how can it physically interact with matter?
    (6 votes)
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    • mr pink green style avatar for user Nitish Roat
      Photon is the quantum of light and light is electromagnetic wave which carries momentum and energy.
      i.e, If the total energy transferred to a surface in time t is U, then p=U/c . So there, is interaction of photon with matter. Take an example you can see the surrounding because photons interact with matter.
      (4 votes)
  • purple pi purple style avatar for user Alex Hickens
    There has been something that has been bothering me ever since I entered the realm of physics and chemistry, it's that how are constants discovered? In school, they just give us the constants as a given and we have to memorize it, but it always nags me that I don't know how it was found out in the first place.
    (7 votes)
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  • duskpin sapling style avatar for user Rachel Smith
    When he completes the equation of E = hf, the seconds and the Hz just disappear and he is left with only J. How do seconds and Hz cancel each other out? I thought Hz was equal to seconds^-1, but am I wrong? Can someone explain how this works?
    (4 votes)
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  • female robot grace style avatar for user tw486364
    Does the application work the same mentally as it's being explained through light or water?

    I'm seeking a deeper understanding mentally for manifesting a new reality.
    (2 votes)
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    • male robot hal style avatar for user Charles LaCour
      Like most analogies the comparison of light to water quickly breaks down.

      While both water and light can be seen as coming in discrete units you can't use E=h*f on a water molecule like you can a photon. There is no water molecule frequency that manifests as a water wave. In water it is the motion of all of the water molecules that produces a water wave where as in light each photon has a wavelength that contributes to the overall wave nature of light.
      (2 votes)

Video transcript

- We've been treating light as a wave, and we've been drawing it with this continuous wave pattern of oscillating electric and magnetic fields that are traveling in some direction. And why shouldn't we treat it as a wave? If you sent it through a small opening, this electromagnetic radiation would spread out, There'd be diffraction, and that's what waves do. Or, if you let it overlap with itself, if you had some wave in some region, and it lined up perfectly with some other electromagnetic wave, you'd get constructive interference. If it was out of phase, you'd get destructive interference. That's what waves do. Why shouldn't we call electromagnetic radiation a wave? And that's what everyone thought. But, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, physicists discovered something shocking. They discovered that light, and all electromagnetic radiation, can display particle-like behavior, too. And I don't just mean localized in some region of space. Waves can get localized. If you sent in some wave here that was a wave pulse, well, that wave pulse is pretty much localized. When it's traveling through here, it's going to kind of look like a particle. That's not really what we mean. We mean something more dramatic. We mean that light, what physicists discovered, is that light and light particles can only deposit certain amount of energy, only discrete amounts of energy. There's a certain chunk of energy that light can deposit, no less than that. So this is why it's called quantum mechanics. You've heard of a quantum leap. Quantum mechanics means a discrete jump, no less than that. And so what do we call these particles of light? We call them photons. How do we draw them? That's a little trickier. We know now light can behave like a wave and a particle, so we kind of split the difference sometimes. Sometimes you'll see it like this, where it's kind of like a wavy particle. So there's a photon, here's another photon. Basically, this is the problem. This is the main problem with wave particle duality, it's called. The fact that light, and everything else, for that matter, can behave in a way that shows wavelike characteristics, it can show particle-like characteristics, there's no classical analog of this. We can't envision in our minds anything that we've ever seen that can do this, that can both behave like a wave and a particle. So it's impossible, basically, to draw some sort of visual representation, but, you know, it's always good to draw something. So we draw our photons like this. And so, what I'm really saying here is, if you had a detector sitting over here that could measure the light energy that it receives from some source of light, what I'm saying is, if that detector was sensitive enough, you'd either get no light energy or one jump, or no light energy or, whoop, you absorbed another photon. You couldn't get in between. If the quantum jump was three units of energy ... I don't want to give you a specific unit yet, but, say, three units of energy you could absorb, if that was the amount of energy for that photon, if these photons were carrying three units of energy, you could either absorb no energy whatsoever or you could absorb all three. You can't absorb half of it. You can't absorb one unit of energy or two units of energy. You could either absorb the whole thing or nothing. That's why it's quantum mechanics. You get this discrete behavior of light depositing all its energy in a particle-like way, or nothing at all. How much energy? Well, we've got a formula for that. The amount of energy in one photon is determined by this formula. And the first thing in it is Planck's constant. H is the letter we use for Planck's constant, and times f. This is it. It's a simple formula. F is the frequency. What is Planck's constant? Well, Planck was basically the father of quantum mechanics. Planck was the first one to figure out what this constant was and to propose that light can only deposit its energy in discrete amounts. So Planck's constant is extremely small; it's 6.626 times 10 to the negative 34th joule times seconds. 10 to the negative 34th? There aren't many other numbers in physics that small. Times the frequency -- this is regular frequency. So frequency, number of oscillations per second, measured in hertz. So now we can try to figure out, why did physicists never discover this before? And the reason is, Planck's constant is so small that the energy of these photons are extremely small. The graininess of this discrete amount of energy that's getting deposited is so small that it just looks smooth. You can't tell that there's a smallest amount, or at least it's very hard to tell. So instead of just saying 'three units,' let's get specific. For violet light, what's the energy of one violet photon? Well, the frequency of violet light is 7.5 times 10 to the 14th hertz. So if you take that number times this Planck's constant, 6.626 times 10 to the negative 34th, you'll get that the energy of one violet photon is about five times 10 to the negative 19th joules. Five times ten to the negative 19th, that's extremely small. That's hard to see. That's hard to notice, that energy's coming in this discrete amount. It's like water. I mean, water from your sink. Water flowing out of your sink looks continuous. We know there's really discrete water molecules in there, and that you can only get one water molecule, no water molecules, 10 water molecules, discrete amounts of these water molecules, but there's so many of them and they're so small, it's hard to tell that it's not just completely continuous. The same is happening with this light. This energy's extremely small. Each violet photon has an extremely small amount of energy that it contributes. In fact, if you wanted to know how small it is, a baseball, a professional baseball player, throwing a ball fast, you know, it's about 100 joules of energy. If you wanted to know how many of these photons, how many of these violet photons would it take to equal the energy of one baseball thrown at major league speed? It would take about two million trillion of these photons to equal the energy in a baseball that's thrown. That's why we don't see this on a macroscopic scale. For all intents and purposes, for all we care, at a macroscopic level, light's basically continuous. It can deposit any energy whatsoever, because the scale's so small here. But if you look at it up close, light can only deposit discrete amounts. Now, I don't mean that light can only deposit small amounts. Light can deposit an enormous amount of energy, but it does so in chunks. So think about it this way ... Let's get rid of all this. Think about it this way: let's say you had a detector that's going to register how much energy it's absorbing, and we'll graph it. We'll graph what this detector's going to measure, the amount of energy per time that it measures. So we'll get the amount of energy per time. Now, you can absorb huge amounts of energy. And on the detector, on a macroscopic scale, it just might look like this. You know, you're getting more and more light energy. You're absorbing more and more energy, collecting more and more energy. But what I'm saying is that, microscopically, if you look at this, what's happening is, you've absorbed one photon here. You absorbed another one, absorbed another one, absorbed a bunch of them. You keep absorbing a bunch of these photons. You can build up a bunch of energy. That's fine. It's just if you looked at it close enough, you have this step pattern that's absorbing photons at a time, certain numbers of them. Maybe it absorbs three at one moment, four at another moment. But you can't absorb anything in between. It can't be completely continuous. It has to be a discrete all-or-nothing moment of absorption of energy that, on a macroscopic scale, looks smooth but on a microscopic scale is highlighted by the fact that light energy is coming in discrete chunks, described by this equation that gives you the energy of individual photons of light.