All Questions
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Which factors determines whether a photon is absorbed? [duplicate]
After some research, I figured out that all EM waves/photons are absorbed by atoms by exciting an electron from an orbital to an other. However, atoms emit only certain EM waves with specific ...
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How to understand the Orbital angular momentum of a photon that is not an integer？
How to understand the topological charge that is not an integer, how would the signal OAM crosstalk if one were to model its transport in turbulence, for example, if the beam carries a topological ...
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57
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How to interpret light and photon?
I've been trying to solidify my understanding on properties of light and this is what my understanding is so far:
Light is an EM wave that travels in a constant speed C.
Light has a quantized energy ...
- 275
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4
answers
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Seeing trajectory of light
I had gone through a few posts on this topic in this community,however the doubt i have is different from them a bit. There it was said that we do not actually see a laser beam unless they are ...
- 1,179
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Is this an example of a spatially coherent wave?
My ultimate goal is to understand why the spatial coherence of a wave increases with distance from the wave source. From what I have read though, there seems to be conflicting definitions of spatial ...
- 1,581
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Does a single photon propagate with phase velocity or front velocity through a dispersive material?
I know that we explain the slowing down of light in a dispersive medium classically, by inducing small dipoles in the medium (which holds as long as being far away from absorption bands), and the ...
- 1,803
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102
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Can Two Electromagnetic waves cancel each other if it 180 degree phase moving in same direction?
If we can send two electromagnetic waves -180 degree out of phase- in same direction, then the interaction of this wave with air molecules will be less due to the low intensity of the combination. So,...
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1
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204
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Can there be a single ray of light?
My physics teacher told me that a beam of light is a collection of rays of light and there cannot be a single absolute ray of light. Is this true?
4
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4
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What are the microscopic details of diffraction?
In a recent question I asked how double-slit diffraction conserves momentum and the answer was that each photon gets a "kick" from the slits. So my question now is, what does that look like ...
- 1,145
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2
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How does a photon know what to do when It interacts with the first surface of a LIGO mirror?
There are 72 alternating boundaries (optical coatings) to traverse before it can decide whether to reflect or pass through the mirror. The boundary properties are such that the the first boundary by ...
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4
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If a polarized light wave is indistinguishable from its original self after being flipped 180°, why doesn't a photon have a spin of two?
The spin of a photon has a counterpart in classical physics, it's polarization, right?
And if you spin a polarized light wave by 180°, (or pi radians), it is now the same as before, correct?
So why ...
- 4,509
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47
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Electromagnetic wave function of a photon
I wanted to find the electromagnetic wave function of a photon, or at least what it might be. An interesting thing about photons is no matter how far they travel, their field stays concentrated ...
- 780
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1
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What's the track it will be for light?
Let's suppose one shaking light starts from Proxima Centauri and travels toward the earth. We know light will travel from more 4 years to reach the earth. It will be interesting if we 'look' at the ...
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1
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206
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Can you see a photon from the side?
I'm trying to understand the shape and size of individual quantum particles.
According to the book Tales of the Quantum the quantum wave of a photon in the visible range is a few centimetres wide. The ...
- 4,783
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All photons incident upon an object are ultimately scattered somewhere, right? Either elastically or inelastically?
From Wikipedia:
Light has a certain probability of being scattered by a material. When photons are scattered, most of them are elastically scattered (Rayleigh scattering), such that the scattered ...
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