Abstract
The fact that light can be regarded as a wave phenomenon was experimentally shown in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Dutch physicist Huygens and the English physician Young with the aid of interference experiments. In the 19th century, the physical nature of these waves came to light: they are electromagnetic waves, described by Maxwell’s equations. They are characterised by the field vectors E and B of the electric and the magnetic field and exhibit a periodicity with the frequency ω.
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Literature
F. Bitter, H.A. Medicus: Fields and Particles: An Introduction to Electromagnetic Wave Phenomena and Quantum Physics (Amer. Elsevier, New York 1973)
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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Haken, H., Wolf, H.C. (1993). The Photon. In: The Physics of Atoms and Quanta. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-97468-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-97468-7_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-56312-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-97468-7
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