Hello, friends. Could you guys explain the significance of the

PE effect -> compton scattering -> compton wavelength -> de broglie wavelengh -> wave-particle duality

How about you write what you know about it first. Just put everything you know.

>>7943365
Well I know that a metal will emit what are called photoelectrons when a light with a high enough frequency hits it. The only factor that will cause an electron to emit is the lights frequency, nothing else. I also know that there's something about energy levels being "quantized," but I don't really know what that means necessarily. And I know that there's some way this concept supports wave-particle duality.

What I'm also not sure is why that the emission of an electron has significance.

It got Einstein his Nobel Prize.
Weird fact: neither of his relativity theories got him a Nobel Prize.

The photoelectric effect requires an enegy above the work energy (W), this tells you about the material.
It can also be used to measure the photon energy.
It is also a basis for light to electricity conversion.

>>7943379
>The only factor that will cause an electron to emit is the lights frequency, nothing else.

That's the important bit. And not only that, the energy that the electrons have when they are emitted depends only on the frequency of the light. How bright the light is only affects how MANY electrons are emitted, not how much energy they have (or whether they are emitted in the first place).

What this tells you is that energy from a specific frequency of light only appears to be absorbed in a very specific quantity (which appears to be directly proportional to frequency). This cannot be explained with classical wave mechanics, which predicts that both number and energy of electrons would increase with brightness.

>>7943379
It supports this duality because we know light behaves as a wave as countless classical experiments show. However, this effect also shows light as a particle.

>>7943379
This may not be the best explanation, but I'll give you a nutshell of what makes it significant. Going off the preconceived (at the time of the experiment's conception) idea that light is a wave, each electron should be receiving a portion of the light wave's energy and this energy should be uniformly distributed across all the electrons. However, what's noticed instead is that some electrons gain a high amount of energy (enough to eject them), while others don't. This seems to imply that light in this instance is behaving more like a particle, because one electron receives the full energy of the photon while others receive nothing.

Think of a pool table. If I line up 4 balls horizontally and pour a bucket at the end of the table, the "wave" of water fills the width of the pool table and pushes each ball slightly as it rushes to the other end. However, if I take the same amount of water and shoot it out of a pressurized hose in a straight line, the water jet will only hit one ball, but will push it significantly further than when it was a uniform wave. It's a similar situation. The frequency of the light in this case acts like the pressure of the water jet coming out of the hose. If the pressure is too low, the ball will never move no matter how long I sit there and point the hose at it. No matter how much volume of water I use, the ball will never move. Just like no matter how many photons I throw at the material, no electrons will ever be ejected. There's a certain threshold frequency needed to dislodge the electron, just like there's a certain threshold pressure needed to move the ball. This is an imperfect analogy but I hope it helps you grasp the intuitive aspect a little better

>>7943379
You described quantization in your post. Instead of a continuous distribution of steadily increasing electrons being released as the frequency rises. What you get is nothing, and then all at once you get a certain level of photoelectrons coming off. That's the quantum effect at work.

Conceptually, it's really nothing more than that energy changes happen in abrupt shifts at the quantum level.

The photoelectric effect is what enables digital imaging. Without digital imaging, there would be no internet porn.

It showes us that photons are quantized because only photons with high enough energy can eject electrons. Before the pe effect people thought of light being a particle. If light would only have the characteristic of particle it would be enough to eject photons from a material if you just higher the intensity, but it does. -> light is quantized and has both particle and wave characteristics

>>7945282
Relativity didn't get him the Nobel prize because of the controversy surrounding relativity. The call to the German physics, and away from the Jewish relativistic physics. The Nobel would probably have gone to him for his work on SR and GR if it wasn't for politics

This is detailed in Walter Isaacons biography of Einstein

>>7945662
And he already had one and it's meant to promote the physicist and since he had already won one he didn't really need that.

>>7945843
Sure. I'm just saying that he would have gotten it for relativity, not photoelectric effect, if there wasn't such antisemitism at the time. But I agree, it doesn't really matter what he got it for

>>7945878

there was no antisemitism at the time, quite the opposite since he already had a Nobel

the real reason is that he didn't discover relativity, it was the work of Gallileo, Poincaré, Lorentz, Minkowski, de Sitter

File: 1436368215681.jpg (108KB, 1958x1029px) Image search: [Google]

108KB, 1958x1029px

>>7945662
>>7945282
it is because Einstein stole the physical side of SR and did not develop the math of both SR and GR himself.

the nobel prize guys saw his scam

literally Waste Heat: the process

>>7945330
Thank you for your detailed explanation, as well as other posters here helping explain this to me. Your post did a good job of helping map out this concept intuitively.

>>7945316
this