Lecture Notes (Photoelectric Effect & X-Rays) - Dickey Physics

- this allowed for a pure metal surface, unaffected by impurities
Applications of PE:
- the PE is the basis of many modern day devices; for example,
night vision goggles use the PE
Photons entering the device
strike a plate which causes
electrons to be emitted, these
pass through a disk consisting
of millions of channels, the
current through these are
amplified and directed towards
a fluorescent screen which
glows when electrons hit it.
Quanta:
- although Einstein used the term quanta to describe the bundled
units of light energy, he was not the first person to suggest
this
- rather, the idea that EM radiation was quantized first came from
a German physicist named Max Planck