Vibration of Photons: Do Photons Oscillate?

[GarryS]

Do photons vibrate or oscillate in any way?

 

[Bill_K]

Photons are not little BBs, they are electromagnetic waves. They have all the properties we associate with electromagnetic waves: E field, B field, frequency and wavelength. It's just that they represent a minimal excitation of the electromagnetic field: you can't have half a photon.

 

[GarryS]

Photons are not little BBs, they are electromagnetic waves. They have all the properties we associate with electromagnetic waves: E field, B field, frequency and wavelength. It's just that they represent a minimal excitation of the electromagnetic field: you can't have half a photon.

If photons can knock out electrons from their orbits why can't they behave as BBs. Isn't any kind of matter wave associated with them?

 

[Bill_K]

GarryS, Photons carry energy and momentum, as all electromagnetic waves do, and some or all of it can be transferred to other particles. The fact that this transfer happens as a discrete event rather than continuously is a general feature of quantum mechanics, not a special property of photons.

The wavefunction used to describe a photon is just the electromagnetic field itself, specifically the vector and scalar potentials A and φ.