PHYS 1201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Electric Field, Photon
Document Summary
Wavelength: the distance between adjacent peak of the the electric (and magnetic) field. Frequency: the number of times each second that the electric field vibrates up and down (or side to side) at any point. Shorter wavelength means higher frequency and vise-versa. Newton learned that light is composed of tiny particles known as waves. The energy stored in an electric field is proportional to magnetic energy. Wavelength x frequency = speed of light = constant. Each photon has a wavelength and frequency. The energy of a photon depends on its frequency. The higher the photon energy, the shorter the wavelength because the energy and the wavelengths are inversely proportional. Atom: electrons are smeared out in clouds of the nucleus. Nucleus: contains positively charged protons (red) and neutral neutrons (grey) The nucleus is nearly 100,000 times smaller than the atom but contains nearly all of its mass. Ten million atoms could fit end to end across this dot.
