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Kirchhoff's original contribution to the physics of thermal radiation was his postulate of a perfect black body radiating and absorbing thermal radiation in an enclosure opaque to thermal radiation and with walls that absorb at all wavelengths. Kirchhoff's perfect black body absorbs all the radiation that falls upon it.
Thus Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation can be stated: For any material at all, radiating and absorbing in thermodynamic equilibrium at any given temperature T, for every wavelength λ, the ratio of emissive power to absorptivity has one universal value, which is characteristic of a perfect black body, and is an emissive power which we here ...
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (German: [ˈgʊs.taːf ˈkɪʁç.hɔf]; 12 March 1824 – 17 October 1887) was a German chemist, mathematician and physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects.
The surface emits a radiative flux density F according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law: = where σ is the Stefan–Boltzmann constant. A key to understanding the greenhouse effect is Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation. At any given wavelength the absorptivity of the atmosphere will be equal to the emissivity. Radiation from the surface could be ...
Kirchhoff's laws, named after Gustav Kirchhoff, may refer to: Kirchhoff's circuit laws in electrical engineering; Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation; Kirchhoff equations in fluid dynamics; Kirchhoff's three laws of spectroscopy; Kirchhoff's law of thermochemistry; Kirchhoff's theorem about the number of spanning trees in a graph
The corresponding fluctuation is thermal radiation (e.g., the glow of a "red hot" object). Thermal radiation turns heat energy into light energy—the reverse of light absorption. Indeed, Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation confirms that the more effectively an object absorbs light, the more thermal radiation it emits.
When there is enough matter in a region to allow molecular collisions to occur very much more often than absorption or emission of photons, for radiation one speaks of local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE). In this case, Kirchhoff's law of equality of radiative absorptivity and emissivity holds. [24]
The principle was used by Gustav Kirchhoff in his derivation of his law of thermal radiation and by Max Planck in his analysis of his law of thermal radiation. For ray-tracing global illumination algorithms, incoming and outgoing light can be considered as reversals of each other, without affecting the bidirectional reflectance distribution ...