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Longer-wavelength radiation such as visible light is nonionizing; the photons do not have sufficient energy to ionize atoms. Throughout most of the electromagnetic spectrum, spectroscopy can be used to separate waves of different frequencies, so that the intensity of the radiation can be measured as a function of frequency or wavelength ...
The concept of wavelength is most often applied to sinusoidal, or nearly sinusoidal, waves, because in a linear system the sinusoid is the unique shape that propagates with no shape change – just a phase change and potentially an amplitude change. [15] The wavelength (or alternatively wavenumber or wave vector) is a characterization of the ...
One of the main reasons for using a frequency-domain representation of a problem is to simplify the mathematical analysis. For mathematical systems governed by linear differential equations, a very important class of systems with many real-world applications, converting the description of the system from the time domain to a frequency domain converts the differential equations to algebraic ...
It equals the spatial frequency. For example, a wavenumber in inverse centimeters can be converted to a frequency expressed in the unit gigahertz by multiplying by 29.979 2458 cm/ns (the speed of light, in centimeters per nanosecond); [5] conversely, an electromagnetic wave at 29.9792458 GHz has a wavelength of 1 cm in free space.
A dispersion relation relates the wavelength or wavenumber of a wave to its frequency. Given the dispersion relation, one can calculate the frequency-dependent phase velocity and group velocity of each sinusoidal component of a wave in the medium, as a function of frequency.
A modulated wave resulting from adding two sine waves of identical amplitude and nearly identical wavelength and frequency. A common situation resulting in an envelope function in both space x and time t is the superposition of two waves of almost the same wavelength and frequency: [2]
As a matter of convention, the ITU divides the radio spectrum into 12 bands, each beginning at a wavelength which is a power of ten (10 n) metres, with corresponding frequency of 3×10 8−n hertz, and each covering a decade of frequency or wavelength. Each of these bands has a traditional name.
This graph includes a range of frequencies from 0 to 1 THz; the microwaves are the subset in the range between 0.3 and 300 gigahertz. Microwaves travel solely by line-of-sight paths; unlike lower frequency radio waves, they do not travel as ground waves which follow the contour of the Earth, or reflect off the ionosphere . [13]