Related papers: Fernando Sanford and the "Kirlian effect"
Julian Schwinger became interested in the Casimir effect in 1975. His original impetus was to understand the quantum force between parallel plates without the concept of zero point fluctuations of field quanta, in the language of source…
The Talbot effect, also referred to as self-imaging or lensless imaging, was originally discovered in the 1830's by Henry Fox Talbot. Over the years, various investigators have found different aspects of this phenomenon, and a theory of the…
The two opposite concepts - multiphoton and effective photon - readily describing the photoelectric effect under strong irradiation in the case that the energy of the incident light is essentially smaller than the ionisation potential of…
We review the literature on possible violations of the superposition principle for electromagnetic fields in vacuum from the earliest studies until the emergence of renormalized QED at the end of the 1940's. The exposition covers…
The well-known interference pattern of bright and dark fringes was first observed for light beams back in 1801 by Thomas Young. The maximum visibility fringes occur when the irradiance of the two beams is equal, and as the ratio of the beam…
A critical review of frequency-shift phenomena a la Doppler effect is presented. The importance of Fermi's theory of 1932 is pointed out, and it is argued that there exists a gap in our understanding of this phenomena at a fundamental…
We show that it is possible to generate a novel single-photon fringe pattern by using two spatially separated identical bi-photon sources. The fringes are similar to the ones observed in a Michelson interferometer and possess certain…
Independent of Maxwell, in 1867 the Danish physicist L. V. Lorenz proposed a theory in which he identified light with electrical oscillations propagating in a very poor conductor. Lorenz's electrodynamic theory of light, which formally was…
Strong coupling with circularly polarized vacuum fluctuations offers a viable route to manipulate molecular chirality. While experiments are advancing toward the realization of chiral cavities, a mean-field theoretical framework for…
From the customary view the Michelson-Morley experiment is used to expose the failure of the aether theory. The key point in this experiment is the \emph{fringe shift} of the interference pattern. Regularly, the fringe shift calculations…
The observations reported by Franke-Arnold et al (SCIENCE Reports, 1 July 2011 p. 65) do not provide evidence of slow light enhanced rotary photon drag as claimed, but arise from well-known saturable absorption phenomena consistent with the…
2008 marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of astrophysical magnetic fields, when George Ellery Hale recorded the Zeeman splitting of spectral lines in sunspots. With the introduction of Babcock's photoelectric magnetograph it soon…
After G. N. Lewis (1875-1946) proposed the term "photon" in 1926, many physicists adopted it as a more apt name for Einstein's light quantum. However, Lewis' photon was a concept of a very different kind, something few physicists knew or…
The photoelectric effect has been discovered by H. Hertz, and studied experimentally by P. Lenard. First theoretical explanation has been done by A. Einstein who suggested the corpuscular theory of light introducing the "photons" which are…
We consider the optical Sagnac effect, when the fictitious gravitational field simulates the reflections from the mirrors. It is shown that no contradiction exists between the conclusions of the laboratory and rotated observers. Because of…
The radiation pressure exerted by incoherent light on diverse surfaces is examined. The thermodynamic rule, first given by Carnot in 1824, describes the limitation to the amount of free energy that can be obtained from a source of thermal…
Proposed by Maxwell in 1879 detector of aether seems, at a superficial glance, a simple device. For example, Michelson in 1881 thought that he built an instrument that (when you turn it in the horizontal plane) will measure in vacuum…
Although electromagnetic and acoustic waves profoundly differ in their nature, comparing their Doppler effects is instructive and reveals persistent conceptual traps. The principle of the Doppler effect was presented by Christian Doppler in…
The phenomenon of sonoluminescence (SL), originally observed some sixty years ago, has recently become the focus of renewed interest, particularly with the discovery that one can trap a single bubble and induce it to exhibit SL stably over…
Soon after Einstein's calculation of the effect of the Sun's gravitational field on the propagation of light in 1911, astronomers around the world tried to measure and verify the value. If the first attempts in Brazil in 1912 or Imperial…