Physics Project: Wave particle duality

Light - a particle or a wave?

Photon model
There are two models of light that are useful to explain various experiments. One model of light describesit as an electromagnetic wave made up of a propagating wave made up of an oscillating electric field andoscillating magnetic field (in a plane perpendicular to the electric field). The color of light depends on itswavelength (or frequency where _f = c in a vacuum). Light can be made up of many electromagnetic wavesof various colors giving you what is called a spectrum. White light is made up of equal amounts of all of thecolors of the visible spectrum.Another model of light describes it as a collection of particles called photons. These photons have no restmass but do have energy (kinetic energy). The energy of a photon is E = hf where h is Plancks constantand f is the frequency of the light. Thus the color of a photon depends on its energy.Visible light is a small region of the entire range of possible energies of photons. The entire range is calledthe electromagnetic spectrum which ranges from gamma rays with very high energy to radio with very lowenergy. The range of energies of the spectrum is shown on pg. 214 of your textbook. The visible range ofthe spectrum is from 1.8 eV (red) to 3.1 eV (violet).The unit of energy most often used for light is the electron-Volt. Note that 1 eV= 1.6 1019 J.

Photo electric effect success of particle theory and failure of wave theory
Photo electric effect success of particle theory
Photoelectric effect explained below in Einsteins explanation of photoelectric effect can be explained by particle theory. Basically, you can bombard a surface with tons and tons of high intensity light, but if the individual photons are low energy, no photoelectrons will be emitted from the surface. But, if you light of a lower wavelength (higher energy), electrons will be emitted. This shows that the energy from the light is delivered in specific, discrete amounts, as if a particle was "colliding" with the surface - light is made up of photons, so it has some particle properties. Therefor particle theory is able to explain the photoelectric effect.

Photo electric effect failure of wave theory

Actually, the true explanation of the photoelectric effect does not involve "photons", in fact the quantum calculations show that light is behaving as a classical wave during this effect! Treating the atom quantum dynamically, we derive the existence of resonant frequencies which are responsible for the "thresholds" Abdulla Aruham Page 1 of 6

Physics Project: Wave particle duality which characterize this effect. Furthermore, the standard photoelectric effect involves the emission of photoelectrons from solids, typically metals. This means that it is an emission from a many-body system that has formed a collective phenomenon to produce bands, such as the conduction band - the atoms have mostly lost their individual identities. It is different than the phenomenon of photoionization that is from individual atoms and molecules. You do not get "resonances" corresponding to individual atoms. These are some reasons why wave nature of light cannot explain photoelectric effect. Above experimental results cannot be understood with the wave theory of light. According to the wave theory 0f light, energy and intensity of wave depends on its amplitude. Hence intense radiation has high energy and on increasing intensity, energy of photo electrons should also increase. In contradiction to it, experimental results show that, the energy of photo-electrons does not depend on the intensity of incident light. According to the wave theory, energy of light has no relation with its frequency. Hence, change in energy of photo electrons with the change in frequency cannot be explained. Photo-electrons are emitted immediately on making light incident on the metal surface. This phenomenon also cannot be explained with wave theory of light. The free electrons are withheld in a metal under the effect of certain forces. To bring them out from the metal certain amount of energy is required. The minimum energy required to get the emission of photo electron is called "work function" Now, if the incident light is considered to have wave nature, free electron in metal may get energy gradually and when it gets energy at least equal to work function, it may escape from the metal. Thus, electron may get emitted sometime after the light is incident. This result is also contradictory to the experimental result (abrupt emission). According to the wave theory, less intense light is 'weak' in terms of energy. To get emission of photo electrons with such light we may have to wait for a long period. But the experimental results show that immediate emission of photo electrons takes place with the light of sufficiently high frequency, though having very low intensity. Thus wave theory of light fails to explain the characteristics of photo electric effect. If light were strictly a wave, the energy in the light would be represented by the amplitude of the light wave. A more intense light source, even if it was light of a lower frequency, would have enough energy to knock electrons away from their molecular orbits, which is necessary to generate a photoelectric current. What actual occurs is that light below a certain threshold frequency does not generate any current, no matter how intense the light is. Even though the total light energy hitting the photoelectric cell may be high, it cannot free electrons. However, if the frequency is increased, even at low intensities, there will be a current. That indicates that the energy from light is delivered in quanta (small units), which is consistent with a particle view of the light. More intense light has more "units" of energy, but if the smallest unit (a photon) has too little oomph (low frequency means low energy per photon), then each collision is too weak to knock the electron. A small number of higher frequency photons will not generate as many collisions, but each collision will set an electron free to jump over to the collector and make a current.

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Einsteins explanation of photoelectric effect

Light and other electromagnetic radiations, such as radio waves, are obviously wavesor so everyone thought. Maxwell and Lorentz had firmly established the wave nature of electromagnetic radiation in electromagnetic theory. Numerous experiments on the interference, diffraction, and scattering of light had confirmed it. We can well appreciate the shock and disbelief when Einstein argued in 1905 that under certain circumstances light behaves not as continuous waves but as discontinuous, individual particles. These particles, or "light quanta," each carried a "quantum," or fixed amount, of energy, much as automobiles produced by an assembly plant arrive only as individual, identical carsnever as fractions of a car. The total energy of the light beam (or the total output of an assembly plant) is the sum total of the individual energies of these discrete "light quanta" (or automobiles), what are called today "photons." Theories of matter and electromagnetic radiation in which the total energy is treated as "quantized" are known as quantum theories. Although Einstein was not the first to break the energy of light into packets, he was the first to take this seriously and to realize the full implications of doing so. Like the special theory of relativity, Einstein's quantum hypothesis arose from an experimental puzzle and an asymmetry or duality in physical theories. The duality consisted of the well-known distinction between material atoms and continuous ether, or, as Einstein wrote in the opening sentence of his light quantum paper, "between the theoretical conceptions that physicists have formed about gases and other ponderable bodies and the Maxwell theory of electromagnetic processes in so-called empty space." As noted earlier, Boltzmann and others conceived of gases as consisting of myriads of individual atoms, while Maxwell and Lorentz envisioned electromagnetic processes as consisting of continuous waves. Einstein sought a unification of these two viewpoints by removing the asymmetry in favor of a discontinuous, "atomic," or quantum, theory of light. Resolution of an experimental puzzle encouraged this approach. The puzzle concerned so-called blackbody radiation, that is, the electro-magnetic radiation given off by a hot, glowing coal in a fireplace, or the radiation emerging from a small hole in a perfectly black box containing electromagnetic radiation at a high temperature. Scientists at the German bureau of standards in Berlin, who were interested in setting standards for the emerging electric lighting industry in Germany, had measured the distribution of the total electromagnetic energy in a black boxwhich would also apply to a glowing light bulbamong the different wavelengths of the light. But no one until Max Planck, at the turn of the century, was able to give a single mathematical formula for the observed distribution of the energy among the emitted wavelengths. Starting with the Maxwell-Lorentz theory of radiation and some natural assumptions about energy, Planck hoped to derive this formula from the second law of thermodynamics. Planck failed to attain the observed formula on these assumptions. Even Lorentz had to admit that his own electron theory could not account for blackbody radiation. Only by reluctantly introducing a radical new assumption into his mathematics could Planck attain the correct formula. The assumption was that the energy of the radiation does not act continuously, as one would expect for waves, but exerts itself in equal discontinuous parcels, or "quanta," of energy. In essence Planck had discovered the quantum structure of electromagnetic
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Physics Project: Wave particle duality

radiation. But Planck himself did not see it that way; he saw the new assumption merely as a mathematical trick to obtain the right answer. Its significance remained for him a mystery. Thomas Kuhn has argued that it is not to Planck in 1900 but to Einstein in 1905 that we owe the origins of quantum theory.Encouraged by his brief but successful application of statistical mechanics to radiation in 1904, in 1905 Einstein attempted to resolve the duality of atoms and waves by demonstrating that part of Planck's formula can arise only from the hypothesis that electromagnetic radiation behaves as if it actually consists of individual "quanta" of energy. The continuous waves of Maxwell's equations, which had been confirmed experimentally, could be considered only averages over myriads of tiny light quanta, essentially "atoms" of light.With his light quantum hypothesis Einstein could not only derive part of Planck's formula but also account directly for certain hitherto inexplicable phenomena. Foremost among them was the photoelectric effect: the ejection of electrons from a metal when irradiated by light. The wave theory of light could not yield a satisfactory account of this, since the energy of a wave is spread over its entire surface. Light quanta, on the other hand, acting like little particles, could easily eject electrons, since the electron absorbs the entire quantum of energy on impact. At first Einstein believed that the light-quantum hypothesis was merely "heuristic": light behaved only as if it consisted of discontinuous quanta. But in a brilliant series of subsequent papers in 1906 and 1907, Einstein used his statistical mechanics to demonstrate that when light interacts with matter, Planck's entire formula can arise only from the existence of light quantanot from waves. Einstein considered that light quanta, together with the equivalence of mass and energy, might result in a reduction of electrodynamics to an atom-based mechanics. But in 1907 he discovered that atoms in matter are also subject to a quantum effect.Here he made use of another galling experimental problem. Experimentalists had found that when solid bodies were cooled, the amount of heat they lost failed to fit a simple formula that followed from Newtonian mechanics. Einstein showed that the experiments could be explained only on the assumption that the oscillating atoms of the solid lattice can have only certain, specific energies, and nothing in between. In other words, even the motions of atomswhich are continuous in Newtonian mechanicsexhibit a quantum structure. Mechanics and electrodynamics both required radical revision, Einstein now concluded: neither could yet account for the existence of electrons or energy quanta.

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Electron A particle or a wave ?

Electron wave Diffraction through crystal
The case of waves (electromagnetic waves such as x-rays or "matter" waves such as electrons) scattering off a crystal lattice is similar to light being scattered by a diffraction grating. However, the three-dimensional case of the crystal is geometrically more complex than the two- (or one-) dimensional diffraction grating case. Bragg's Law governs the position of the diffracted maxima in the case of the crystal. A wave diffracted by a crystal behaves as if it were reflected off the planes of the crystal. Moreover there is an outgoing diffracted wave only if the path length differences between rays reflected off adjacent planes are an integral number of wavelengths. Thus considering a beam scattering off two parallel planes of atoms as shown in figure.A beam incident on a pair of planes separated by a distance d. (For reinforcement of the scattering from atoms in one plane the usual condition for reflection applies, - angle of reflection equal angle of incidence)

De Broglie s Theorem
(Quantum theory)

The wave structure of matter deduces the de Broglie wavelength of Quantum Theory.From de Broglie's particle wave duality of matter to the spherical standing wave structure of matter causing the 'Particle' effect at the wave center. Quantum Theory: Louis De Broglie (1892 - 1987): Explaining de Broglie Wavelength / Matter Waves of Quantum Theory Determination of the stable motion of electrons in the atom introduces integers, and up to this point the only phenomena involving integers in physics were those of interference and of normal modes of vibration. This fact suggested to me the idea that electrons too could not be considered simply as particles, but that frequency (wave properties) must be assigned to them also. (Louis de Broglie, on Quantum Theory, 1929, Nobel Prize Speech) Thus I arrived at the following general idea which has guided my researches: for matter, just as much as for radiation, in particular light, we must introduce at one and the same time the corpuscle concept and the wave concept. In other words, in both cases we must assume the existence of corpuscles accompanied by waves. But corpuscles and waves cannot be independent, since, according to Bohr, they are complementary to each other; consequently it must be possible to establish a certain parallelism between the motion of a corpuscle and the propagation of the wave which is associated with it. (Quantum Theory, Louis de Broglie)

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CONCLUSION
WAVEPARTICLE DUALITY
In the 1600s, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton proposed competing theories for light's behavior. Huygens proposed a wave theory of light while Newton's was a "corpuscular" (particle) theory of light. Huygens' theory had some issues in matching observation. Newton's prestige helped lend support to his theory, so for over a century his theory was dominant. In the early nineteenth century, complications arose for the corpuscular theory of light. Diffraction had been observed, for one thing, which it had trouble adequately explaining. Thomas Young's double slit experiment resulted in obvious wave behavior and seemed to firmly support the wave theory of light over Newton's particle theory. A wave generally has to propagate through a medium of some kind. The medium proposed by Huygens had been luminiferousaether (or in more common modern terminology, ether). When James Clerk Maxwell quantified a set of equations (called Maxwell's laws or Maxwell's equations) to explain electromagnetic radiation (including visible light) as the propagation of waves, he assumed just such an ether as the medium of propagation, and his predictions were consistent with experimental results. The problem with the wave theory was that no such ether had ever been found. Not only that, but astronomical observations in stellar aberration by James Bradley in 1720 had indicated that ether would have to be stationary relative to a moving Earth. Throughout the 1800s, attempts were made to detect the ether or its movement directly, culminating in the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. They all failed to actually detect the ether, resulting in a huge debate as the twentieth century began. Was light a wave or a particle? In 1905, Albert Einstein published his paper to explain the photoelectric effect, which proposed that light traveled as discrete bundles of energy. The energy contained within a photon was related to the frequency of the light. This theory came to be known as the photon theory of light (although the word photon wasn't coined until years later). With photons, the ether was no longer essential as a means of propagation, although it still left the odd paradox of why wave behavior was observed. Even more peculiar were the quantum variations of the double slit experiment and the Compton effect which seemed to confirm the particle interpretation. As experiments were performed and evidence accumulated, the implications quickly became clear and alarming: Light functions as both a particle and a wave, depending on how the experiment is conducted and when observations are made.

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