What Determines Particle Amplitude? Examining Photons and Interference

Goalie_Ca
Messages
102
Reaction score
0
What, if anything, determines the amplitude of a sub-atomic particle. A specific question is do all photons have the same amplitude? I would assume that at least photons of same color do, since i can observe the destructive interference.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
I guess that by amplitude you mean energy. In that case they do not have same energy. Photons are just particle/"wave impulse". Their energy is defined by process that spawned them and there are no limits (other than available energy of course).
It goes for all other particles they don't have only one well defined energy level.

In case of same colour photons you are right. Their energy is probably very similar.
 
The amplitude of an e/m wave at a particular point is dependant on the photon flux at that point. Photons themselves do not constitute amplitude in a classical sense.

Claude.
 

Thread 'Toponium Discovered'

Toponium is a hadron which is the bound state of a valance top quark and a valance antitop quark. Oversimplified presentations often state that top quarks don't form hadrons, because they decay to bottom quarks extremely rapidly after they are created, leaving no time to form a hadron. And, the vast majority of the time, this is true. But, the lifetime of a top quark is only an average lifetime. Sometimes it decays faster and sometimes it decays slower. In the highly improbable case that...
View full post »

Thread 'Dirac-Delta from Normalization of Continuous Eigenfunctions'

I'm following this paper by Kitaev on SL(2,R) representations and I'm having a problem in the normalization of the continuous eigenfunctions (eqs. (67)-(70)), which satisfy \langle f_s | f_{s'} \rangle = \int_{0}^{1} \frac{2}{(1-u)^2} f_s(u)^* f_{s'}(u) \, du. \tag{67} The singular contribution of the integral arises at the endpoint u=1 of the integral, and in the limit u \to 1, the function f_s(u) takes on the form f_s(u) \approx a_s (1-u)^{1/2 + i s} + a_s^* (1-u)^{1/2 - i s}. \tag{70}...
View full post »

Similar threads

A The Factorization Theorem in Particle Physics
Replies
6
Views
2K
I What exactly is the amplitude of an interaction?
Replies
5
Views
2K
I How prone is a photon to interacting with uncharged structureless particles?
Replies
8
Views
3K
A Calculation of amplitude with n=5, k=3 using the book by Arkani-Hamed et al
Replies
0
Views
2K
I Mechanism of Energy Conservation in Zero-Amplitude Sum of EM Waveforms
Replies
12
Views
632
A Particle distribution in the longitudinal beam dynamics in accelerator
Replies
2
Views
3K
I Constructive Interference of Light
Replies
15
Views
1K
I Is quantum interference an instantaneous consequence of superposition ?
Replies
12
Views
1K
I Amplitude of particles in the medium of a longitudinal wave
Replies
1
Views
1K
I What are the differences between photon and neutrino oscillations?
Replies
3
Views
2K

Hot Threads

Recent Insights

Back
Top