Stack Exchange network consists of 177 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online co

What exactly is a photon?

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-27 02:30:02

Stack Exchange network consists of 177 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. It only takes a minute to sign up.

Consider the question, "What is a photon?". The answers say, "an elementary particle" and not much else. They don't actually answer the question. Moreover, the question is flagged as a duplicate of, "What exactly is a quantum of light?" – the answers there don't tell me what a photon is either. Nor do any of the answers to this question mentioned in the comments. When I search on "photon", I can't find anything useful. Questions such as, "Wave function of a photon" look promising, but bear no fruit. Others say things like, "the photon is an excitation of the photon field." That tells me nothing. Nor does the tag description, which says:

The photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic four-potential, and therefore the massless bosonic particle associated with the electromagnetic force, commonly also called the 'particle of light'...

Leave a Comment