Light, visible light, or visible radiation is electromagnetic radiation that can be perceived by

the human eye.[1][2] Visible light spans the visible spectrum and is usually defined as
having wavelengths in the range of 400–700 nanometres (nm), corresponding
to frequencies of 750–420 terahertz. The visible band sits adjacent to the infrared (with
longer wavelengths and lower frequencies) and the ultraviolet (with shorter wavelengths and
higher frequencies), called collectively optical radiation.[3][4]

In physics, the term "light" may refer more broadly to electromagnetic radiation of any
wavelength, whether visible or not.[5][6] In this sense, gamma rays, X-
rays, microwaves and radio waves are also light. This is why visible radiation is commonly
termed visible light.[7][8]

The primary properties of light are intensity, propagation direction, frequency or

wavelength spectrum, and polarization. Its speed in vacuum, 299792458 m/s, is one of the
fundamental constants of nature.[9] All electromagnetic radiation exhibits some properties of
both particles and waves. Single, massless elementary particles, or quanta, of light
called photons can be detected with specialized equipment; phenomena like interference are
described by waves. Most everyday interactions with light can be understood
using geometrical optics. Quantum optics is an important research area in modern physics.

The main source of natural light on Earth is the Sun. Historically, another important source of
light for humans has been fire, from ancient campfires to modern kerosene lamps. With the
development of electric lights and power systems, electric lighting has effectively replaced
firelight.

Electromagnetic spectrum and visible light

The electromagnetic spectrum,

with the visible portion highlighted. The bottom graph (Visible spectrum) is wavelength in
units of nanometres (nm).
Main article: Electromagnetic spectrum
Generally, electromagnetic radiation (EMR) is classified by wavelength into radio
waves, microwaves, infrared, the visible spectrum that we perceive as light, ultraviolet, X-
rays and gamma rays. The designation "radiation" excludes static electric, magnetic and near
fields.

The behavior of EMR depends on its wavelength. Higher frequencies have shorter
wavelengths and lower frequencies have longer wavelengths. When EMR interacts with
single atoms and molecules, its behavior depends on the amount of energy per quantum it
carries.
EMR in the visible light region consists of quanta (called photons) that are at the lower end of
the energies that are capable of causing electronic excitation within molecules, which leads to
changes in the bonding or chemistry of the molecule. At the lower end of the visible light
spectrum, EMR becomes invisible to humans (infrared) because its photons no longer have
enough individual energy to cause a lasting molecular change (a change in conformation) in
the visual molecule retinal in the human retina, which change triggers the sensation of vision.

There exist animals that are sensitive to various types of infrared, but not by means of
quantum-absorption. Infrared sensing in snakes depends on a kind of natural thermal
imaging, in which tiny packets of cellular water are raised in temperature by the infrared
radiation. EMR in this range causes molecular vibration and heating effects, which is how
these animals detect it.

Above the frequency range of visible light, ultraviolet light becomes invisible to humans,
mostly because it is absorbed by the cornea with wavelengths shorter than 360 nm and the
internal lens at wavelengths shorter than 400 nm. Furthermore, the rods and cones located in
the retina of the human eye cannot detect the very short (shorter than 360 nm) ultraviolet
wavelengths and are in fact damaged by ultraviolet. Many animals with eyes that do not
require lenses (such as insects and shrimp) are able to detect ultraviolet, by quantum photon-
absorption mechanisms, in much the same chemical way that humans detect visible light.

Various sources define visible light as narrowly as 420–680 nm[10][11] to as broadly as 380–
800 nm.[12][13] Under ideal laboratory conditions, people can see infrared up to at least
1,050 nm;[14] children and young adults may perceive ultraviolet wavelengths down to about
310–313 nm.[15][16][17]

Plant growth is also affected by the colour spectrum of light, a process known
as photomorphogenesis.

Speed of light
Main article: Speed of light

Beam of sun light inside the cavity of Rocca ill'Abissu

at Fondachelli-Fantina, Sicily
The speed of light in vacuum is defined to be exactly 299792458 m/s (approximately 186,282
miles per second). The fixed value of the speed of light in SI units results from the fact that
the metre is now defined in terms of the speed of light. All forms of electromagnetic radiation
move at exactly this same speed in vacuum.

Different physicists have attempted to measure the speed of light throughout

history. Galileo attempted to measure the speed of light in the seventeenth century. An early
experiment to measure the speed of light was conducted by Ole Rømer, a Danish physicist, in
1676. Using a telescope, Rømer observed the motions of Jupiter and one of its moons, Io.
Noting discrepancies in the apparent period of Io's orbit, he calculated that light takes about
22 minutes to traverse the diameter of Earth's orbit.[18] However, its size was not known at that
time. If Rømer had known the diameter of the Earth's orbit, he would have calculated a speed
of 227000000 m/s.

Another more accurate measurement of the speed of light was performed in Europe
by Hippolyte Fizeau in 1849.[19] Fizeau directed a beam of light at a mirror several kilometers
away. A rotating cog wheel was placed in the path of the light beam as it traveled from the
source, to the mirror and then returned to its origin. Fizeau found that at a certain rate of
rotation, the beam would pass through one gap in the wheel on the way out and the next gap
on the way back. Knowing the distance to the mirror, the number of teeth on the wheel and
the rate of rotation, Fizeau was able to calculate the speed of light as 313000000 m/s.

Léon Foucault carried out an experiment which used rotating mirrors to obtain a value
of 298000000 m/s[19] in 1862. Albert A. Michelson conducted experiments on the speed of
light from 1877 until his death in 1931. He refined Foucault's methods in 1926 using
improved rotating mirrors to measure the time it took light to make a round trip from Mount
Wilson to Mount San Antonio in California. The precise measurements yielded a speed
of 299796000 m/s.[20]

The effective velocity of light in various transparent substances containing ordinary matter, is
less than in vacuum. For example, the speed of light in water is about 3/4 of that in vacuum.

Two independent teams of physicists were said to bring light to a "complete standstill" by
passing it through a Bose–Einstein condensate of the element rubidium, one team at Harvard
University and the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the other
at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also in Cambridge.[21] However, the
popular description of light being "stopped" in these experiments refers only to light being
stored in the excited states of atoms, then re-emitted at an arbitrary later time, as stimulated
by a second laser pulse. During the time it had "stopped", it had ceased to be light.

Optics
Main article: Optics

The study of light and the interaction of light and matter is termed optics. Optics has different
forms appropriate to different circumstances. Geometrical optics, appropriate for
understanding things like eyes, lenses, cameras, fiber optics, and mirrors, works well when
the wavelength of light is small in comparison to the objects it interacts with. Physical
optics incorporates wave properties and is needed to understand diffraction and
interference. Quantum optics applies when studying individual photons interacting with
matter.[22]: 33
Surface scattering
A transparent object allows light to transmit or pass through. Conversely, an opaque object
does not allow light to transmit through and instead reflecting or absorbing the light it
receives. Most objects do not reflect or transmit light specularly and to some
degree scatters the incoming light, which is called glossiness. Surface scattering is caused by
the surface roughness of the reflecting surfaces, and internal scattering is caused by the
difference of refractive index between the particles and medium inside the object. Like
transparent objects, translucent objects allow light to transmit through, but translucent objects
also scatter certain wavelength of light via internal scattering.[23]

Refraction
Main article: Refraction

Due to refraction, the straw dipped in water appears

bent and the ruler scale compressed when viewed from a shallow angle.
Refraction is the bending of light rays when passing through a surface between one
transparent material and another. It is described by Snell's Law:

where θ1 is the angle between the ray and the surface normal in the first medium, θ2 is the
angle between the ray and the surface normal in the second medium and n1 and n2 are
the indices of refraction, n = 1 in a vacuum and n > 1 in a transparent substance.

When a beam of light crosses the boundary between a vacuum and another medium, or
between two different media, the wavelength of the light changes, but the frequency remains
constant. If the beam of light is not orthogonal (or rather normal) to the boundary, the change
in wavelength results in a change in the direction of the beam. This change of direction is
known as refraction.

The refractive quality of lenses is frequently used to manipulate light in order to change the
apparent size of images. Magnifying glasses, spectacles, contact
lenses, microscopes and refracting telescopes are all examples of this manipulation.

Light sources
"Lightsource" redirects here. For the solar energy developer named Lightsource,
see Lightsource Renewable Energy. For a particle accelerator used to generate X-rays,
see Synchrotron light source.
Further information: List of light sources
There are many sources of light. A body at a given temperature emits a characteristic
spectrum of black-body radiation. A simple thermal source is sunlight, the radiation emitted
by the chromosphere of the Sun at around 6,000 K (5,730 °C; 10,340 °F). Solar radiation
peaks in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum when plotted in wavelength units,
[24]
and roughly 44% of the radiation that reaches the ground is visible.[25] Another example
is incandescent light bulbs, which emit only around 10% of their energy as visible light and
the remainder as infrared. A common thermal light source in history is the glowing solid
particles in flames, but these also emit most of their radiation in the infrared and only a
fraction in the visible spectrum.

The peak of the black-body spectrum is in the deep infrared, at about

10 micrometre wavelength, for relatively cool objects like human beings. As the temperature
increases, the peak shifts to shorter wavelengths, producing first a red glow, then a white one
and finally a blue-white colour as the peak moves out of the visible part of the spectrum and
into the ultraviolet. These colours can be seen when metal is heated to "red hot" or "white
hot". Blue-white thermal emission is not often seen, except in stars (the commonly seen pure-
blue colour in a gas flame or a welder's torch is in fact due to molecular emission, notably by
CH radicals emitting a wavelength band around 425 nm and is not seen in stars or pure
thermal radiation).

Atoms emit and absorb light at characteristic energies. This produces "emission lines" in the
spectrum of each atom. Emission can be spontaneous, as in light-emitting diodes, gas
discharge lamps (such as neon lamps and neon signs, mercury-vapor lamps, etc.) and flames
(light from the hot gas itself—so, for example, sodium in a gas flame emits characteristic
yellow light). Emission can also be stimulated, as in a laser or a microwave maser.

Deceleration of a free charged particle, such as an electron, can produce visible

radiation: cyclotron radiation, synchrotron radiation and bremsstrahlung radiation are all
examples of this. Particles moving through a medium faster than the speed of light in that
medium can produce visible Cherenkov radiation. Certain chemicals produce visible
radiation by chemoluminescence. In living things, this process is called bioluminescence. For
example, fireflies produce light by this means and boats moving through water can disturb
plankton which produce a glowing wake.

Certain substances produce light when they are illuminated by more energetic radiation, a
process known as fluorescence. Some substances emit light slowly after excitation by more
energetic radiation. This is known as phosphorescence. Phosphorescent materials can also be
excited by bombarding them with subatomic particles. Cathodoluminescence is one example.
This mechanism is used in cathode-ray tube television sets and computer monitors.

Hong Kong illuminated by colourful

artificial lighting
Certain other mechanisms can produce light:

 Electroluminescence
 Scintillation
 Sonoluminescence
 Triboluminescence
When the concept of light is intended to include very-high-energy photons (gamma rays),
additional generation mechanisms include:

 Particle–antiparticle annihilation
 Radioactive decay
Measurement
Main articles: Photometry (optics) and Radiometry
Light is measured with two main alternative sets of units: radiometry consists of
measurements of light power at all wavelengths, while photometry measures light with
wavelength weighted with respect to a standardized model of human brightness perception.
Photometry is useful, for example, to quantify Illumination (lighting) intended for human use.

The photometry units are different from most systems of physical units in that they take into
account how the human eye responds to light. The cone cells in the human eye are of three
types which respond differently across the visible spectrum and the cumulative response
peaks at a wavelength of around 555 nm. Therefore, two sources of light which produce the
same intensity (W/m2) of visible light do not necessarily appear equally bright. The
photometry units are designed to take this into account and therefore are a better
representation of how "bright" a light appears to be than raw intensity. They relate to
raw power by a quantity called luminous efficacy and are used for purposes like determining
how to best achieve sufficient illumination for various tasks in indoor and outdoor settings.
The illumination measured by a photocell sensor does not necessarily correspond to what is
perceived by the human eye and without filters which may be costly, photocells and charge-
coupled devices (CCD) tend to respond to some infrared, ultraviolet or both.

Light pressure
Main article: Radiation pressure
Light exerts physical pressure on objects in its path, a phenomenon which can be deduced
by Maxwell's equations, but can be more easily explained by the particle nature of light:
photons strike and transfer their momentum. Light pressure is equal to the power of the light
beam divided by c, the speed of light. Due to the magnitude of c, the effect of light pressure
is negligible for everyday objects. For example, a one-milliwatt laser pointer exerts a force
of about 3.3 piconewtons on the object being illuminated; thus, one could lift a U.S.
penny with laser pointers, but doing so would require about 30 billion 1-mW laser pointers.
[26]
However, in nanometre-scale applications such as nanoelectromechanical
systems (NEMS), the effect of light pressure is more significant and exploiting light pressure
to drive NEMS mechanisms and to flip nanometre-scale physical switches in integrated
circuits is an active area of research.[27] At larger scales, light pressure can cause asteroids to
spin faster,[28] acting on their irregular shapes as on the vanes of a windmill. The possibility of
making solar sails that would accelerate spaceships in space is also under investigation.[29][30]
Although the motion of the Crookes radiometer was originally attributed to light pressure,
this interpretation is incorrect; the characteristic Crookes rotation is the result of a partial
vacuum.[31] This should not be confused with the Nichols radiometer, in which the (slight)
motion caused by torque (though not enough for full rotation against friction) is directly
caused by light pressure.[32] As a consequence of light pressure, Einstein in 1909 predicted the
existence of "radiation friction" which would oppose the movement of matter.[33] He wrote,
"radiation will exert pressure on both sides of the plate. The forces of pressure exerted on the
two sides are equal if the plate is at rest. However, if it is in motion, more radiation will be
reflected on the surface that is ahead during the motion (front surface) than on the back
surface. The backwardacting force of pressure exerted on the front surface is thus larger than
the force of pressure acting on the back. Hence, as the resultant of the two forces, there
remains a force that counteracts the motion of the plate and that increases with the velocity of
the plate. We will call this resultant 'radiation friction' in brief."

Usually light momentum is aligned with its direction of motion. However, for example
in evanescent waves momentum is transverse to direction of propagation.[34]

Historical theories about light, in

chronological order
Classical Greece and Hellenism
In the fifth century BC, Empedocles postulated that everything was composed of four
elements; fire, air, earth and water. He believed that goddess Aphrodite made the human eye
out of the four elements and that she lit the fire in the eye which shone out from the eye
making sight possible. If this were true, then one could see during the night just as well as
during the day, so Empedocles postulated an interaction between rays from the eyes and rays
from a source such as the sun.[35]

In about 300 BC, Euclid wrote Optica, in which he studied the properties of light. Euclid
postulated that light travelled in straight lines and he described the laws of reflection and
studied them mathematically. He questioned that sight is the result of a beam from the eye,
for he asks how one sees the stars immediately, if one closes one's eyes, then opens them at
night. If the beam from the eye travels infinitely fast this is not a problem.[36]

In 55 BC, Lucretius, a Roman who carried on the ideas of earlier Greek atomists, wrote that
"The light & heat of the sun; these are composed of minute atoms which, when they are
shoved off, lose no time in shooting right across the interspace of air in the direction imparted
by the shove." (from On the nature of the Universe). Despite being similar to later particle
theories, Lucretius's views were not generally accepted. Ptolemy (c. second century) wrote
about the refraction of light in his book Optics.[37]

Classical India
In ancient India, the Hindu schools of Samkhya and Vaisheshika, from around the early
centuries AD developed theories on light. According to the Samkhya school, light is one of
the five fundamental "subtle" elements (tanmatra) out of which emerge the gross elements.
The atomicity of these elements is not specifically mentioned and it appears that they were
actually taken to be continuous.[38] The Vishnu Purana refers to sunlight as "the seven rays of
the sun".[38]
The Indian Buddhists, such as Dignāga in the fifth century and Dharmakirti in the seventh
century, developed a type of atomism that is a philosophy about reality being composed of
atomic entities that are momentary flashes of light or energy. They viewed light as being an
atomic entity equivalent to energy.[38]

Descartes
René Descartes (1596–1650) held that light was a mechanical property of the luminous body,
rejecting the "forms" of Ibn al-Haytham and Witelo as well as the "species" of Roger
Bacon, Robert Grosseteste and Johannes Kepler.[39] In 1637 he published a theory of
the refraction of light that assumed, incorrectly, that light travelled faster in a denser medium
than in a less dense medium. Descartes arrived at this conclusion by analogy with the
behaviour of sound waves.[citation needed] Although Descartes was incorrect about the relative
speeds, he was correct in assuming that light behaved like a wave and in concluding that
refraction could be explained by the speed of light in different media.

Descartes is not the first to use the mechanical analogies but because he clearly asserts that
light is only a mechanical property of the luminous body and the transmitting medium,
Descartes's theory of light is regarded as the start of modern physical optics.[39]

Particle theory
Main article: Corpuscular theory of light

Pierre Gassendi
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), an atomist, proposed a particle theory of light which was
published posthumously in the 1660s. Isaac Newton studied Gassendi's work at an early age
and preferred his view to Descartes's theory of the plenum. He stated in his Hypothesis of
Light of 1675 that light was composed of corpuscles (particles of matter) which were emitted
in all directions from a source. One of Newton's arguments against the wave nature of light
was that waves were known to bend around obstacles, while light travelled only in straight
lines. He did, however, explain the phenomenon of the diffraction of light (which had been
observed by Francesco Grimaldi) by allowing that a light particle could create a localized
wave in the aether.

Newton's theory could be used to predict the reflection of light, but could only
explain refraction by incorrectly assuming that light accelerated upon entering a
denser medium because the gravitational pull was greater. Newton published the final version
of his theory in his Opticks of 1704. His reputation helped the particle theory of light to hold
sway during the eighteenth century. The particle theory of light led Pierre-Simon Laplace to
argue that a body could be so massive that light could not escape from it. In other words, it
would become what is now called a black hole. Laplace withdrew his suggestion later, after a
wave theory of light became firmly established as the model for light (as has been explained,
neither a particle or wave theory is fully correct). A translation of Newton's essay on light
appears in The large scale structure of space-time, by Stephen Hawking and George F. R.
Ellis.

The fact that light could be polarized was for the first time qualitatively explained by Newton
using the particle theory. Étienne-Louis Malus in 1810 created a mathematical particle theory
of polarization. Jean-Baptiste Biot in 1812 showed that this theory explained all known
phenomena of light polarization. At that time the polarization was considered as the proof of
the particle theory.

Wave theory
To explain the origin of colours, Robert Hooke (1635–1703) developed a "pulse theory" and
compared the spreading of light to that of waves in water in his 1665
work Micrographia ("Observation IX"). In 1672 Hooke suggested that light's vibrations
could be perpendicular to the direction of propagation. Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695)
worked out a mathematical wave theory of light in 1678 and published it in his Treatise on
Light in 1690. He proposed that light was emitted in all directions as a series of waves in a
medium called the luminiferous aether. As waves are not affected by gravity, it was assumed
that they slowed down upon entering a denser medium.[40] Another supporter of the wave
theory was Leonhard Euler. He argued in Nova Theoria lucis et colorum (1746)
that diffraction could more easily be explained by a wave theory.

Christiaan Huygens

Thomas Young's sketch of water waves

showing diffraction[41]
The wave theory predicted that light waves could interfere with each other like sound waves
(as noted around 1800 by Thomas Young). Young showed by means of
numerous diffraction experiments that light behaved as waves.[42]: 101 He first publicly stated his
"general law" of interference in January 1802, in his book A Syllabus of a Course of Lectures
on Natural and Experimental Philosophy:[43]

But the general law, by which all these appearances are governed, may be very easily
deduced from the interference of two coincident undulations, which either cooperate, or
destroy each other, in the same manner as two musical notes produce an alternate intension
and remission, in the beating of an imperfect unison.[44]
He also proposed that different colours were caused by different wavelengths of light and
explained colour vision in terms of three-coloured receptors in the eye.

In 1816 André-Marie Ampère gave Augustin-Jean Fresnel an idea that the polarization of
light can be explained by the wave theory if light were a transverse wave.[45] Later, Fresnel
independently worked out his own wave theory of light and presented it to the Académie des
Sciences in 1817. Siméon Denis Poisson challenged Fresnel's model, claiming that it
predicted a bright spot in the shadow behind a circular obstacle contrary to common
sense. Dominique-François-Jean Arago created an experiment that showed the bright spot:
Poisson's challenge became new evidence for the wave theory.[42]: 109 In 1818, Young wrote to
Arago suggesting that light must be transverse waves, not the longitudinal waves
characteristic of sound. Fresnel took up the idea and was able to show via mathematical
methods that polarization could be explained by a transverse wave theory of light with no
longitudinal vibration.[42]: 115

The weakness of the wave theory was that light waves, like sound waves, would need a
medium for transmission. The existence of the hypothetical substance luminiferous
aether proposed by Huygens in 1678 was cast into strong doubt in the late nineteenth century
by the Michelson–Morley experiment.

Newton's corpuscular theory implied that light would travel faster in a denser medium, while
the wave theory of Huygens and others implied the opposite. At that time, the speed of
light could not be measured accurately enough to decide which theory was correct. The first
to make a sufficiently accurate measurement was Léon Foucault, in 1850.[46] His result
supported the wave theory, and the classical particle theory was finally abandoned (only to
partly re-emerge in the twentieth century as photons in quantum theory).

Electromagnetic theory
Main article: Electromagnetic radiation

A linearly
polarized electromagnetic wave traveling along the z-axis, with E denoting the electric
field and perpendicular B denoting magnetic field
In 1845, Michael Faraday discovered that the plane of polarization of linearly polarized light
is rotated when the light rays travel along the magnetic field direction in the presence of a
transparent dielectric, an effect now known as Faraday rotation.[47] This was the first evidence
that light was related to electromagnetism. In 1846 he speculated that light might be some
form of disturbance propagating along magnetic field lines.[47] Faraday proposed in 1847 that
light was a high-frequency electromagnetic vibration, which could propagate even in the
absence of a medium such as the ether.[48]

Faraday's work inspired James Clerk Maxwell to study electromagnetic radiation and light.
Maxwell discovered that self-propagating electromagnetic waves would travel through space
at a constant speed, which happened to be equal to the previously measured speed of light.
From this, Maxwell concluded that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation: he first
stated this result in 1862 in On Physical Lines of Force. In 1873, he published A Treatise on
Electricity and Magnetism, which contained a full mathematical description of the behavior
of electric and magnetic fields, still known as Maxwell's equations. Soon after, Heinrich
Hertz confirmed Maxwell's theory experimentally by generating and detecting radio waves in
the laboratory and demonstrating that these waves behaved exactly like visible light,
exhibiting properties such as reflection, refraction, diffraction and interference. Maxwell's
theory and Hertz's experiments led directly to the development of modern radio, radar,
television, electromagnetic imaging and wireless communications.

In the quantum theory, photons are seen as wave packets of the waves described in the
classical theory of Maxwell. The quantum theory was needed to explain effects even with
visual light that Maxwell's classical theory could not (such as spectral lines).

Quantum theory
In 1900 Max Planck, attempting to explain black-body radiation, suggested that although
light was a wave, these waves could gain or lose energy only in finite amounts related to their
frequency. Planck called these "lumps" of light energy "quanta" (from a Latin word for "how
much"). In 1905, Albert Einstein used the idea of light quanta to explain the photoelectric
effect and suggested that these light quanta had a "real" existence. In 1923 Arthur Holly
Compton showed that the wavelength shift seen when low intensity X-rays scattered from
electrons (so called Compton scattering) could be explained by a particle-theory of X-rays,
but not a wave theory. In 1926 Gilbert N. Lewis named these light quanta particles photons.[49]

Eventually quantum mechanics came to picture light as (in some sense) both a particle and a
wave, and (in another sense) as a phenomenon which is neither a particle nor a wave (which
actually are macroscopic phenomena, such as baseballs or ocean waves). Instead, under some
approximations light can be described sometimes with mathematics appropriate to one type
of macroscopic metaphor (particles) and sometimes another macroscopic metaphor (waves).

As in the case for radio waves and the X-rays involved in Compton scattering, physicists
have noted that electromagnetic radiation tends to behave more like a classical wave at lower
frequencies, but more like a classical particle at higher frequencies, but never completely
loses all qualities of one or the other. Visible light, which occupies a middle ground in
frequency, can easily be shown in experiments to be describable using either a wave or
particle model, or sometimes both.

In 1924–1925, Satyendra Nath Bose showed that light followed different statistics from that
of classical particles. With Einstein, they generalized this result for a whole set of integer spin
particles called bosons (after Bose) that follow Bose–Einstein statistics. The photon is a
massless boson of spin 1.
 In 1927, Paul Dirac quantized the electromagnetic field. Pascual Jordan and Vladimir
Fock generalized this process to treat many-body systems as excitations of quantum fields, a
process with the misnomer of second quantization. And at the end of the 1940s a full theory
of quantum electrodynamics was developed using quantum fields based on the works
of Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, and Shinichiro Tomonaga.

Quantum optics
Main article: Quantum optics
John R. Klauder, George Sudarshan, Roy J. Glauber, and Leonard Mandel applied quantum
theory to the electromagnetic field in the 1950s and 1960s to gain a more detailed
understanding of photodetection and the statistics of light (see degree of coherence). This led
to the introduction of the coherent state as a concept which addressed variations between
laser light, thermal light, exotic squeezed states, etc. as it became understood that light cannot
be fully described just referring to the electromagnetic fields describing the waves in the
classical picture. In 1977, H. Jeff Kimble et al. demonstrated a single atom emitting one
photon at a time, further compelling evidence that light consists of photons. Previously
unknown quantum states of light with characteristics unlike classical states, such as squeezed
light were subsequently discovered.

Development of short and ultrashort laser pulses—created by Q

switching and modelocking techniques—opened the way to the study of what became known
as ultrafast processes. Applications for solid state research (e.g. Raman spectroscopy) were
found, and mechanical forces of light on matter were studied. The latter led to levitating and
positioning clouds of atoms or even small biological samples in an optical trap or optical
tweezers by laser beam. This, along with Doppler cooling and Sisyphus cooling, was the
crucial technology needed to achieve the celebrated Bose–Einstein condensation.

Other remarkable results are the demonstration of quantum entanglement, quantum

teleportation, and quantum logic gates. The latter are of much interest in quantum
information theory, a subject which partly emerged from quantum optics, partly from
theoretical computer science.

Use for light on Earth

Sunlight provides the energy that green plants use to create sugars mostly in the form
of starches, which release energy into the living things that digest them. This process
of photosynthesis provides virtually all the energy used by living things. Some species of
animals generate their own light, a process called bioluminescence. For example, fireflies use
light to locate mates and vampire squid use it to hide themselves from prey.

See also
 Physics portal

 Science portal

 Ballistic photon
 Colour temperature
 Fermat's principle
 Huygens' principle
 Journal of Luminescence
 Light beam – in particular about light beams visible from the side
 Light Fantastic (TV series)
 Light mill
 List of light sources
 Luminescence: The Journal of Biological and Chemical Luminescence
 Spectroscopy
Notes
References
1. CIE (1987). International Lighting Vocabulary Archived 27 February 2010 at the Wayback
Machine. Number 17.4. CIE, 4th ed.. ISBN 978-3-900734-07-7.
By the International Lighting Vocabulary, the definition of light is: "Any radiation capable of
causing a visual sensation directly."
2. CIE JTC 8. "light, <photometric> noun". CIE S 017/E:2020 ILV: International Lighting
Vocabulary, 2nd Edition. International Commission on Illumination
(CIE). doi:10.25039/S017.2020.
3. Pal, G.K.; Pal, Pravati (2001). "chapter 52". Textbook of Practical Physiology (1st ed.).
Chennai: Orient Blackswan. p. 387. ISBN 978-81-250-2021-9. Archived from the original on
8 October 2022. Retrieved 11 October 2013. The human eye has the ability to respond to all
the wavelengths of light from 400–700 nm. This is called the visible part of the spectrum.
4. Buser, Pierre A.; Imbert, Michel (1992). Vision. MIT Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-262-02336-8.
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External links
 Media related to Light at Wikimedia Commons
 The dictionary definition of light at Wiktionary
 Quotations related to Light at Wikiquote