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A photon (from Ancient Greek φῶς, φωτός (phôs, phōtós) 'light') is an elementary particle that is a quantum of the electromagnetic field, including electromagnetic radiation such as light and radio waves, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force.
Photon energy is the energy carried by a single photon. The amount of energy is directly proportional to the photon's electromagnetic frequency and thus, equivalently, is inversely proportional to the wavelength. The higher the photon's frequency, the higher its energy. Equivalently, the longer the photon's wavelength, the lower its energy.
Photons are massless particles of definite energy, definite momentum, and definite spin. To explain the photoelectric effect, Albert Einstein assumed heuristically in 1905 that an electromagnetic field consists of particles of energy of amount hν, where h is the Planck constant and ν is the wave frequency.
Like all types of electromagnetic radiation, visible light propagates by massless elementary particles called photons that represents the quanta of electromagnetic field, and can be analyzed as both waves and particles. The study of light, known as optics, is an important research area in modern physics.
As a wave, light is characterized by a velocity (the speed of light), wavelength, and frequency. As particles, light is a stream of photons. Each has an energy related to the frequency of the wave given by Planck's relation E = hf, where E is the energy of the photon, h is the Planck constant, 6.626 × 10 −34 J·s, and f is the frequency of ...
[1] An analogy would be light traveling through a fog: at near distances a light source is more clearly visible than at long distances due to the scattering of light by fog particles. Similarly, the further a gamma-ray travels through the universe, the more likely it is to be scattered by an interaction with a low energy photon from the ...
In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper advancing the hypothesis that light energy is carried in discrete quantized packets to explain experimental data from the photoelectric effect. Einstein theorized that the energy in each quantum of light was equal to the frequency of light multiplied by a constant, later called the Planck constant. A ...
The Planck relation [1] [2] [3] (referred to as Planck's energy–frequency relation, [4] the Planck–Einstein relation, [5] Planck equation, [6] and Planck formula, [7] though the latter might also refer to Planck's law [8] [9]) is a fundamental equation in quantum mechanics which states that the energy E of a photon, known as photon energy, is proportional to its frequency ν: =.