Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Light, or more generally an electromagnetic wave, carries not only energy but also momentum, which is a characteristic property of all objects in translational motion. The existence of this momentum becomes apparent in the "radiation pressure " phenomenon, in which a light beam transfers its momentum to an absorbing or scattering object, generating a mechanical pressure on it in the process.
The momentum transfer plays an important role in the evaluation of neutron, X-ray, and electron diffraction for the investigation of condensed matter. Laue-Bragg diffraction occurs on the atomic crystal lattice, conserves the wave energy and thus is called elastic scattering, where the wave numbers final and incident particles, and , respectively, are equal and just the direction changes by a ...
High-energy photons of 1.022 MeV and above may bombard the nucleus and cause an electron and a positron to be formed, a process called pair production; even-higher-energy photons (beyond a threshold energy of at least 1.670 MeV, depending on the nuclei involved), can eject a nucleon or alpha particle from the nucleus in a process called ...
Due to the law of conservation of momentum, any change in the total momentum of the waves or photons must involve an equal and opposite change in the momentum of the matter it interacted with (Newton's third law of motion), as is illustrated in the accompanying figure for the case of light being perfectly reflected by a surface. This transfer ...
Radiative transfer (also called radiation transport) is the physical phenomenon of energy transfer in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The propagation of radiation through a medium is affected by absorption, emission, and scattering processes. The equation of radiative transfer describes these interactions mathematically. Equations of ...
The general expression for the spin angular momentum is [1] =, where is the speed of light in free space and is the conjugate canonical momentum of the vector potential.The general expression for the orbital angular momentum of light is =, where = {,,,} denotes four indices of the spacetime and Einstein's summation convention has been applied.
The energy and momentum of an object measured in two inertial frames in energy–momentum space – the yellow frame measures E and p while the blue frame measures E ′ and p ′. The green arrow is the four-momentum P of an object with length proportional to its rest mass m 0.
It can, however, form a wave packet centered on momentum k (with slight uncertainty), and centered on a certain position (with slight uncertainty). The center position of this wave packet changes as the wave propagates, moving through the crystal at the velocity v given by the formula above. In a real crystal, an electron moves in this way ...