This line from the Hack-A-Day article got me: "Everything on the electromagnetic spectrum has some properties of both waves and particles, but it’s difficult to imagine a radio wave, for example, behaving like a particle."
It is indeed difficlut (at least for me!) to imagine this, especially when we think of the operation of that dipole using waves (not particles).
I really like Jeroen's channel and his approach. Note him waking up, obviously thinking about this question.
Thanks Jeroen, and thanks Hack-A-Day!
Haven't seen the video, but any electromagnetic wave - radio, light, anything - can also be represented as composed of finite numbers of energy packets (photons). Thanks to our friend Planck, the equation for photon energy from wavelength is simple: E = hc/f where h = Planck constant, c = speed of light and f = frequency. It's just that radio photons have extremely small energy so we can work with them virtually all the time not as quantized particles but as continuous waves. Consider: a ~red light wave (600 nm) has an energy of 2.066 eV (e.g. energy generated by accelerating an electron through 2.066 V), but our favorite 40m wavelength has an energy of only 3.1 x 10^-8 eV! Very very weak for anything trying to see individual photon statistics at these incredibly long wavelengths compared to light. However, the ability to detect single radio-frequency photons "has become increasingly essential due to the rise of superconducting quantum computing" (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.013034) and this can be done at microwave frequencies now, but you have to use exotica like quantum dots and other things I don't fully understand. This is really frontier stuff.
ReplyDeleteThanks Phil. Jeroen's comment about how, "it is difficult to imagine a radio wave, for example, behaving as a particle." I know it is true, but I too find it difficult to imagine! All of my understanding of antennas is based on waves, not particles. 73 Bill N2CQR
ReplyDeleteWarning: colossal error in typing above. How did I miss that? It's h times FREQUENCY not wavelength. Physics failure.
ReplyDelete