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If photons were not purely massless, their speeds would vary with frequency, with lower-energy (redder) photons moving slightly slower than higher-energy photons. Relativity would be unaffected by this; the so-called speed of light, c , would then not be the actual speed at which light moves, but a constant of nature which is the upper bound on ...
The neutrino [a] was postulated first by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain how beta decay could conserve energy, momentum, and angular momentum ().In contrast to Niels Bohr, who proposed a statistical version of the conservation laws to explain the observed continuous energy spectra in beta decay, Pauli hypothesized an undetected particle that he called a "neutron", using the same -on ending ...
Photons with high photon energy can transform in quantum mechanics to lepton and quark pairs, the latter fragmented subsequently to jets of hadrons, i.e. protons, pions, etc.At high energies E the lifetime t of such quantum fluctuations of mass M becomes nearly macroscopic: t ≈ E/M 2; this amounts to flight lengths as large as one micrometer for electron pairs in a 100 GeV photon beam, while ...
The energy content of this volume element at 5 km from the station is 2.1 × 10 −10 × 0.109 = 2.3 × 10 −11 J, which amounts to 3.4 × 10 14 photons per (). Since 3.4 × 10 14 > 1, quantum effects do not play a role. The waves emitted by this station are well-described by the classical limit and quantum mechanics is not needed.
Similarly, the total energy of the system is its total (relativistic) mass times the speed of light squared. Systems whose four-momentum is a null vector (for example, a single photon or many photons moving in exactly the same direction) have zero invariant mass and are referred to as massless.
The graviton is a hypothetical tensor boson proposed to be the carrier of gravitational force in some quantum theories of gravity, but no such theory has been successfully incorporated into the Standard Model, so the Standard Model neither predicts any such particle nor requires it, and no gravitational quantum particle has been indicated by experiment.
As such, they have no rest mass, because they can never be measured in a frame where they are at rest. This property of having no rest mass is what causes these particles to be termed "massless". However, even massless particles have a relativistic mass, which varies with their observed energy in various frames of reference.
Photonic molecules are formed when individual (massless) photons "interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass". [4] In an alternative definition (which is not equivalent), photons confined to two or more coupled optical cavities also reproduce the physics of interacting atomic energy levels , and have been termed ...