Did Planck, Einstein, and Bose count indivisible photons or discrete emission/absorption processes in a black-body cavity?

Michael Ambroselli; Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri

doi:10.1117/12.2188291

10 September 2015 Did Planck, Einstein, and Bose count indivisible photons or discrete emission/absorption processes in a black-body cavity?

Michael Ambroselli, Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9570, The Nature of Light: What are Photons? VI; 957009 (2015) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2188291
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2015, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Planck, Einstein and Bose all had to introduce statistics, and thus counting, in order to successfully derive an equation for the energy distribution within the black-body radiation spectrum, and what we now call Bose-Einstein statistics. Some of the details involved in the counting procedure vary while still giving the same result. However, the interpretation of what we count may differ dramatically from one another (as, for example, between Planck and Bose), without impacting the final, mathematical result. We demonstrate here a further alternative, which varies both, in the details of the counting, as well as in the interpretation, while still producing the same well known statistics. This approach puts the "quantumness" back into the radiation emission/absorption process, possibly dispensing with the requirement of quantized light, at least in the context of black-body radiation.

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Michael Ambroselli and Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri "Did Planck, Einstein, and Bose count indivisible photons or discrete emission/absorption processes in a black-body cavity?", Proc. SPIE 9570, The Nature of Light: What are Photons? VI, 957009 (10 September 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2188291

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