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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 ...
Of these, only the photon has been experimentally confirmed to be massless. Although there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe that gluons are massless, they can never be observed as free particles due to being confined within hadrons, and hence their presumed lack of rest mass cannot be confirmed by any feasible experiment. [1] [2]
However, for a black body, the energy distribution is established by the interaction of the photons with matter, usually the walls of the container, and the number of photons is not conserved. As a result, the chemical potential of the black-body photon gas is zero at thermodynamic equilibrium.
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.
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 ...
To create an electron-positron pair, the total energy of the photons, in the rest frame, must be at least 2m e c 2 = 2 × 0.511 MeV = 1.022 MeV (m e is the mass of one electron and c is the speed of light in vacuum), an energy value that corresponds to soft gamma ray photons.
Mass–energy equivalence states that all objects having mass, or massive objects, have a corresponding intrinsic energy, even when they are stationary.In the rest frame of an object, where by definition it is motionless and so has no momentum, the mass and energy are equal or they differ only by a constant factor, the speed of light squared (c 2).