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The photon has no electric charge, [17] [18] is generally considered to have zero rest mass [19] and is a stable particle. The experimental upper limit on the photon mass [ 20 ] [ 21 ] is very small, on the order of 10 −50 kg; its lifetime would be more than 10 18 years. [ 22 ]
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.
Photoinduced charge separation is the process of an electron in an atom or molecule, being excited to a higher energy level by the absorption of a photon and then leaving the atom or molecule to free space, or to a nearby electron acceptor.
The photon (carrier of electromagnetism) is one of two known gauge bosons that are both believed to be massless; the other is the gluon (carrier of the strong force). The only other confirmed gauge bosons are the W and Z bosons , which are known from experiment to be extremely massive.
While the electron has a negative electric charge, the positron has a positive electric charge, and is produced naturally in certain types of radioactive decay. The opposite is also true: the antiparticle of the positron is the electron. Some particles, such as the photon, are their own antiparticle. Otherwise, for each pair of antiparticle ...
Virtual photons can have a range of polarizations, which can be described as the orientation of the electric and magnetic fields that make up the photon. The polarization of a virtual photon is determined by the direction of its momentum and its interaction with the charges that emit or absorb it.
The energy given to the electron by the photon "excites" it into the conduction band where it is free to move around within the semiconductor. The network of covalent bonds that the electron was previously a part of now has one fewer electron. This is known as a hole, and it has positive charge.
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 ...