Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory that describes the behavior of nature at and below the scale of atoms. [ 2]: 1.1 It is the foundation of all quantum physics, which includes quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science . Quantum mechanics can describe many systems that classical physics ...
The idea of quantum field theory began in the late 1920s with British physicist Paul Dirac, when he attempted to quantize the energy of the electromagnetic field; just as in quantum mechanics the energy of an electron in the hydrogen atom was quantized. Quantization is a procedure for constructing a quantum theory starting from a classical theory.
The history of quantum mechanics is a fundamental part of the history of modern physics. The major chapters of this history begin with the emergence of quantum ideas to explain individual phenomena—blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect, solar emission spectra—an era called the Old or Older quantum theories. [ 1]
1885 – Johann Jakob Balmer discovers a numerical relationship between visible spectral lines of hydrogen, the Balmer series. 1887 – Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect, shown by Einstein in 1905 to involve quanta of light. 1888 – Hertz demonstrates experimentally that electromagnetic waves exist, as predicted by Maxwell.
t. e. An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain how the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics might correspond to experienced reality. Quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and extremely precise tests in an extraordinarily broad range of experiments. However, there exist a number of contending schools of thought ...
The mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics are those mathematical formalisms that permit a rigorous description of quantum mechanics. This mathematical formalism uses mainly a part of functional analysis, especially Hilbert spaces, which are a kind of linear space. Such are distinguished from mathematical formalisms for physics theories ...
Important applications of quantum theory include quantum chemistry, quantum optics, quantum computing, superconducting magnets, light-emitting diodes, the optical amplifier and the laser, the transistor and semiconductors such as the microprocessor, medical and research imaging such as magnetic resonance imaging and electron microscopy. [ 4]
In physics, relativistic quantum mechanics ( RQM) is any Poincaré covariant formulation of quantum mechanics (QM). This theory is applicable to massive particles propagating at all velocities up to those comparable to the speed of light c, and can accommodate massless particles. The theory has application in high energy physics, [ 1] particle ...