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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 ...
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 ...
An FM radio station transmitting at 100 MHz emits photons with an energy of about 4.1357 × 10 −7 eV. This minuscule amount of energy is approximately 8 × 10 −13 times the electron's mass (via mass–energy equivalence). Very-high-energy gamma rays have photon energies of 100 GeV to over 1 PeV (10 11 to 10 15 electronvolts) or 16 nJ to 160 ...
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.
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).
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 ...
At those energies and distances, very high energy gamma-ray photons have a significant probability of a photon-photon interaction with a low energy background photon from the extragalactic background light resulting in either the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs via direct pair production or (less often) by photon-photon scattering ...