Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Ermanno Amata
Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali
INAF
Via del fosso del cavaliere, 100
00133 Roma
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
Many certainties were shattered, when physicists obtained new experimental results
which forced them to develop two new visions of nature:
- quantum mechanics,
- relativity.
In my lectures, I shall only deal with the birth of quantum mechanics, but I will also
have to recall some basic concepts of special relativity.
I shall treat the following subjects:
- black body radiation,
- the corpuscular nature of light (Compton and photo-electric effects),
- Thomsons, Rutherfords and Bohrs atoms.
In so doing, I shall follow your physics textbook (Amaldi Blu per licei scientifici).
However, I will depart from it from time to time.
P.S. I have downloaded some digital images from the Internet. In doing that, I have found out that there is a large amount of web sites
which deal with physics at various levels. Students can easily find them .
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
We see that at 5000 K the peak of emission falls roughly in the middle of the visible spectrum. At this
temperature the black body exhibits a whitish colour. As the temperature decreases, the peak moves
towards the higher wavelength limit of visible light, i.e. towards red. Finally, for T=830 K (not plotted in the
figure) there will be no visible emission and the hole of the cavity will appear as a black body according to
everyday experience.
The dependence of the spectral radiance peak on wavelength was derived by Wilhelm Wien in 1893 by
means of thermodynamic arguments. Wiens displacement law can be written as
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
Here A and B are two ad hoc constants. This law shows that spectral radiance goes to 0 as ; moreover,
it shows that it goes through a maximum as decreases and eventually tends to 0 as 0.
For a few years, it seemed that the problem of explaining black body emission had been solved.
However, further measurements in the far infrared range ( < 60 m, not shown in the figure) revealed that
Wiens distribution law did not reproduce experimental data at such wavelengths.
In conclusion, at the beginning of the 20th century physicists had still to find a law which would
describe accurately the spectral radiance of black body at all wavelengths.
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
Wien, Raleigh-Jeans
Planck
Let us now stop for a while and recall where physicists stood in 1900 with regard to black body radiation.
They had at hand two laws, both derived in the framework of classical electromagnetism:
- Wiens distribution law which worked well at low wavelengths only;
- Raleigh-Jeans law, which worked well at high wavelengths only.
It is clear that there was the need to develop a new law which included both.
Moreover, in order to develop such a new law, new ideas were probably needed.
This is exactly what Max Planck did in 1900.
Your textbook does not explain how Planck did it. I will not fully explain that either.
However, I can show to you how he probably got his idea from a mathematical point of view and I will give
you some hints on how he later on gave a physical interpretation of his law.
Let us compare Raleigh-Jeans and Wiens laws (the latter written in a slightly different form):
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
Some calculations
We modify Wiens law by adding a teensy-weensy -1 to the exponential in the denominator, so as to get
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.
These assumptions have the practical effect of greatly diminishing the amount of energy which can be
emitted at low wavelenghts, so as to avoid the ultraviolet catastrophe.
In this way, Planck obtained the black body radiation law.
By integrating Plancks law over all wavelengths, it is possible to derive Stefan-Boltzmanns law and to show
that = (25k4)/(15c2h3).
For many years, Planck himself did not fully accept his discovery, which completely shattered the classical
vision of nature.
In fact, some years later he wrote: my futile attempts to fit the elementary quantum of action (i.e. h)
somehow into the classical theory continued for a number of years, and they cost me a great deal of effort!
Although Planck gave birth to quantum mechanics by quantising the energy of the oscillators in the black
body cavity, he still treated the radiation as an electromagnetic wave.
The next step towards quanta was made by Albert Einstein
P.S. There is a minor difference (a factor ) between the form of Plancks law I have used and the one reported in your textbook. In fact your
textbook considers the radiance (energy per unit surface per unit wavelength) instead of spectral radiance (energy per unit surface per unit solid
angle per unit wavelength). This difference does not affect at all the considerations I have made.
Lectures delivered at the Liceo Scientifico Statale Bruno Touschek, Grottaferrata, on February 16, 17 and 18, 2015.