Shanice McSavaney BS Physics - III

Developments Leading to Quantum Mechanics

Today, the world often recognizes December 14, 1900 as the birthday of Quantum Mechanics. This was the day that Max Planck announced results of an experiment that changed the views of physicists everywhere. Before that day, the world was thought to be of the concepts of Classical Physics. It was believed that this world was continuous and deterministic. On that legendary day, Max Planck announced that the world was not continuous, nor deterministic. At least, not everything is. Max Planck discovered that the energy of microscopic systems is not emitted in a continuous manner after all. Rather, energy is emitted in discrete steps, or quanta, and must be a multiple of a certain value e.

From a previous equation on the energy of particles, E will then assume this value:

With the equation that forms the basis of the theory of blackbody radiation, we can then replace E to form the following, where p is the spectral density of radiation:

So that it will be in accordance with Wien's thermodynamic law, we let to obtain the final Planck's equation:

be proportional to

This was a great achievement that is actually a huge stepping stone towards Quantum Mechanics. At the time, though, this wasn't thought to be a very big deal. Even Max Planck himself was unsure of his ides and it was not until after he received a Nobel prize that he realized the true significance of quantum. Though this idea of some physical quantities being "quantized" was not fully accepted, many other scientists found it useful in their own situations. One of the first scientists to put to use Planck's idea of energy quantization was Albert Einstein. He realized that it could be used with the photoelectric effect if energy was in photons, rather than waves. Einstein used this description of energy to break away from classical physics even further. Energy did not simply emit in quanta, according to Einstein, but it was also carried by waves in separate quanta. With these thoughts, one could then derive an elementary theory of photons. First is to refer to the energy of a light wave according to classical theory:

Then, we should consider the electromagnetic momentum classical theory which can be written in two forms:

of the light wave in

After this, Einstein considered the relation between momentum and energy. In the theory

of relativity, a similar relation between energy and momentum is for particles with zero rest mass. Einstein then thought that an electromagnetic field can also be thought of as a set of particles called photons, but with zero rest mass. The energy would therefore be:

With that, the photon momentum would then be:

With these concepts, Einstein was then able to come up with a quantitave theory regarding the photoelectric effect. He came up with the following equation:

This is the law of conservation of energy and it indicates that the kinetic energy of the ejected electron is equal to the difference between the energy of the absorbed photon and the work function of an electron in the metal. This would mean that if the energy were less than the work function, the electrons can not be ejected. Experiments have confirmed Einsteins theory that the energy of the ejected electron depends on the frequency of the incident light, rather than its intensity which was previously thought. Also, the photoelectrons can only be ejected when the frequency of light exceeds the threshold frequency, or the minimum frequency needed. The implications of this theory were verified in experiments by an Ohio native named Arthur Holly Compton.

In 1923, Arthur Holly Compton introduced to the world of science an effect that supported even more the idea of photons. It was called the Compton effect, or Compton

Scattering, and it was the experiment that convinced physicists that light is a particle. This effect shows what happens when a high-energy photon collides with a target. It then releases loosely bound electrons from the outer shell of the atom or molecule. This is shown in the diagram below.

From the conservation of momentum,

The x and y components would therefore be the following:

In the upward diagram, the incident photon has an energy E , the scattered photon E , and the scattered electron E . So, from the conservation of kinetic energy:

The energy would then be:

Also, since

The equations now become:

We then proceed by squaring the 2 momentum equations and then adding them together. 1a becomes:

2a becomes:

Adding the two together gives us:

Since,

Then,

We can then square 3a and minus 6 from it.

Developments that lead to Quantum Mechanics progressed until it was brought another

step further in the mid- 1920s. This was when the quantum theory brought its way to atomic physics. The theory of the atom at the time was from reliable experimental data. They had studied the effect of the emission of light by atoms and had concluded that they have bright line spectra and that the lines are arranged in certain definite serious. One example was the Balmers formula where the lines of hydrogen were described:

This can be written in a second form:

where the T represent spectral terms. These terms for the hydrogen atom are given by:

Other effects that were studied were the behavior of an atom in external electric and magnetic fields and the interaction of the atoms of a substance with fast particles passing through it. Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand- born British chemist and physicist held several experiments regarding this. The final one to mention is the investigation of various properties if molecules provided important data pertaining to the properties of atoms. After concluding certain facts regarding the atom, scientists then began trying to construct a static model of it. It is significant to mention that in classical electrodynamics, an accelerated electron emits radiation, the amount of energy emitted per time could then be told in the following:

where e is the electron charge, w is the acceleration of the electron, and c is the velocity of light in vacuum. The negative sign simply shows that the energy of the electron decreases as

a result of the emission of radiant energy. One model that came out in this time was the Plum Pudding Model. This was by J. J. Thomson. In this model, positive charges fill up the atom entirely surrounding the negative charges, like plums surrounded by pudding. The charge density inside the sphere was:

In the ground state, the electron was supposed to be located at the middle of the sphere, where the electric field would have been zero. The Gauss law could explain the electred field E directed along the radius and its intensity:

Therefore,

So, if an electron with charge e and and mass m is placed at a distance x from the center of the atom, there will be a quasi-elastic attractive force towards the center, expressed as:

Though the Thompson model was in line with the classical Lorentz theory, it could still not explain the regularities of the line spectra of atoms. It Ernest Rutherford who finally demolished the Thompson model by showing that positive charge was not indeed distributed throughout the entire atom. It is Rutherfords experiments that contributed to the model of the atom that replaced Thomsons. Moving on to the Bohr theory, Neils Bohr was a Danish physicist who made great contributions toward Quantum Mechanics. We shall first limit ourselves the case of a Hydrogen atom with a single electron moving around it:

From Bohr's model, another scientist took up inspiration and was able to make his own bold discoveries in Physics. Louis de Broglie was a French physicist who was finishing his doctorate in 1924. His thesis proposed that moving bodies have wave properties that complement their particle properties. It is also important to add that he believed in a symmetrical nature. Therefore, if waves had particle properties, then particles had wave properties. By equating the formulas of energy, de Broglie derived an expression for the frequency of a particle:

f = E/h where E = energy

h = Plancks constant or

= h/p where h = Plancks constant

p = momentum De Broglie's theory was proven later on by Davisson and Germer, two scientists who conducted an electron diffraction experiment. Through this, they were able to prove that particles do exhibit wave characteristics and vice versa. The last development towards the start of Quantum Mechanics was definitely not the least. Discovered in 1927 by Werner Heisenberg, the uncertainty principle states the following: It is impossible to know both the exact position and exact momentum of an object at the same time. Heisenberg declared this making the final breakthrough from Classical Physics. This was the final development that was made before the start of Quantum Mechanics. Without all these developments, the branch of physics that has helped physicists learn so much more in

our world today would not have existed. We truly owe thanks to these great scientists.