Light

Light, visible light, or visible radiation is electromagnetic radiation that can be perceived by
the human eye.[1] 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.[2][3]

A triangular prism dispersing a beam of white

light. The longer wavelengths (red) and the
shorter wavelengths (green-blue) are
separated.

In physics, the term "light" may refer more broadly to electromagnetic radiation of any
wavelength, whether visible or not.[4][5] In this sense, gamma rays, X-rays, microwaves and
radio waves are also light. The primary properties of light are intensity, propagation
direction, frequency or wavelength spectrum, and polarization. Its speed in vacuum,
299 792 458 m/s, is one of the fundamental constants of nature.[6] Like all types of
electromagnetic radiation, visible light propagates by massless elementary particles called
photons that represents the quanta of electromagnetic field, and can be analyzed as both
waves and particles. The study of light, known as 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).

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 range of visible light, ultraviolet light becomes invisible to humans, mostly
because it is absorbed by the cornea below 360 nm and the internal lens below 400 nm.
Furthermore, the rods and cones located in the retina of the human eye cannot detect the
very short (below 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[7][8] to as broadly as 380–
800 nm.[9][10] Under ideal laboratory conditions, people can see infrared up to at least
1,050 nm;[11] children and young adults may perceive ultraviolet wavelengths down to about
310–313 nm.[12][13][14]

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

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 299 792 458 m/s (approx. 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.[15] 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 227 000 000 m/s.
Another more accurate measurement of the speed of light was performed in Europe by
Hippolyte Fizeau in 1849.[16] 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 313 000 000 m/s.

Léon Foucault carried out an experiment which used rotating mirrors to obtain a value of
298 000 000 m/s[16] 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 299 796
000 m/s.[17]

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.[18] 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

The study of light and the interaction of light and matter is termed optics. The observation
and study of optical phenomena such as rainbows and the aurora borealis offer many clues
as to the nature of light.
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 scatterance is caused by the
surface roughness of the reflecting surfaces, and internal scatterance 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 scatterance.[19]

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

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,[20] and roughly 44% of the radiation that reaches the ground is visible.[21]
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

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

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.[22] 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.[23] At larger scales, light pressure can
cause asteroids to spin faster,[24] 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.[25][26]

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.[27] 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.[28] As a consequence of light pressure, Einstein in 1909
predicted the existence of "radiation friction" which would oppose the movement of
matter.[29] 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.[30]

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.[31]

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.[32]

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.[33]

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.[34] The Vishnu Purana refers to sunlight as "the seven rays
of the sun".[34]

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.[34]

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.[35] 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. 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.[35]

Particle theory

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 localised
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.[36]
 Christiaan Huygens

Thomas Young's sketch of a

double-slit experiment showing
diffraction. Young's
experiments supported the
theory that light consists of
waves.

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 a diffraction experiment
that light behaved as waves. 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. 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. 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.[37]

Later, Fresnel independently worked out his own wave theory of light and presented it to the
Académie des Sciences in 1817. Siméon Denis Poisson added to Fresnel's mathematical work to
produce a convincing argument in favor of the wave theory, helping to overturn Newton's
corpuscular theory. By the year 1821, Fresnel was able to show via mathematical methods
that polarization could be explained by the wave theory of light if and only if light was
entirely transverse, with no longitudinal vibration whatsoever.

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.[38] 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

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.[39] 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.[39] 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.[40]

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.[41]

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

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

Ballistic photon
Physics portal
Colour temperature
Science portal
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

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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