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A photon (from Ancient Greek φῶς, φωτός (phôs, phōtós) 'light') is an elementary particle that is a quantum of the electromagnetic field, including electromagnetic radiation such as light and radio waves, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force.
In the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton had advocated that light was corpuscular (particulate), but Christiaan Huygens took an opposing wave description. While Newton had favored a particle approach, he was the first to attempt to reconcile both wave and particle theories of light, and the only one in his time to consider both, thereby anticipating modern wave-particle duality.
The experiment belongs to a general class of "double path" experiments, in which a wave is split into two separate waves (the wave is typically made of many photons and better referred to as a wave front, not to be confused with the wave properties of the individual photon) that later combine into a single wave.
1926 Erwin Schrödinger proves that the wave and matrix formulations of quantum theory are mathematically equivalent; 1926 Erwin Schrödinger states his nonrelativistic quantum wave equation and formulates quantum wave mechanics; 1926 Gilbert N. Lewis introduces the term "photon", thought by him to be "the carrier of radiant energy." [5] [6]
The photon having non-zero linear momentum, one could imagine that it has a non-vanishing rest mass m 0, which is its mass at zero speed. However, we will now show that this is not the case: m 0 = 0. Since the photon propagates with the speed of light, special relativity is called for. The relativistic expressions for energy and momentum ...
Memorial of Heinrich Hertz on the campus of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, which translates as At this site, Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves in the years 1885–1889 In 1881 and 1882, Hertz published two articles [ 31 ] [ 32 ] [ 33 ] on what was to become known as the field of contact mechanics , which proved to be an ...
The concept that matter behaves like a wave was proposed by French physicist Louis de Broglie (/ d ə ˈ b r ɔɪ /) in 1924, and so matter waves are also known as de Broglie waves. The de Broglie wavelength is the wavelength , λ , associated with a particle with momentum p through the Planck constant , h : λ = h p . {\displaystyle \lambda ...
The actual word 'photon' was invented still later, by G.N. Lewis in 1926, [156] who mistakenly believed that photons were conserved, contrary to Bose–Einstein statistics; nevertheless the word 'photon' was adopted to express the Einstein postulate of the packet nature of light propagation. In an electromagnetic field isolated in a vacuum in a ...