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  • Milestones
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Milestone 5

Just a moment

Compton effect

Nature Materials volume 9, pages S8–S9 (2010)Cite this article

But by the beginning of the twentieth century, experiments on the interaction of supposedly wave-like radiation with particle-like matter had begun to challenge this dichotomy (Milestone 3), and in 1905 Einstein proposed a completely quantized picture of light. While Compton's X-ray scattering experiments came well afterwards, they represented an important and independent confirmation of Einstein's picture: they delivered the first direct evidence that the momentum of light, as well as its energy, was quantized. In the experiments, X-rays that were scattered from electrons increased their wavelength to an extent depending on the incident angle, but not on the incident wavelength. According to classical physics, the incoming radiation accelerated many electrons simultaneously and over a finite period of time, and the change in wavelength could result from a Doppler effect. Such an explanation led, however, to unrealistic electron-recoil velocities, and produced the wrong dependence on scattering angle and incident wavelength. The "different hypothesis" of Compton instead postulated an elastic collision between a single photon of light and a single electron to which it instantaneously delivered a single quantum of momentum, leading to a reduction in the energy and wavelength of the photon.

These experiments laid the foundation for the modern quantum theory of light. In 1929, the Compton effect became among the first phenomena to be modelled using quantum electrodynamics, which would develop into one of the most tested and accurate of all physical theories (Milestone 6). This model, by Oskar Klein and Yoshio Nishina, applied Paul Dirac's relativistic electron equation, which had been developed only the year before, to reproduce successfully the intensities and energies of Compton-scattered X-rays.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Compton, A. H. A quantum theory of the scattering of X-rays by light elements. Phys. Rev. 21, 483–502 (1923)

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  2. Klein, O. & Nishina, Y. Über die Streuung von Strahlung durch freie Elektronen nach der neuen relativistischen Quantendynamik von Dirac. Z. Phys. 52, 853–868 (1929)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Stuewer, R. H. The Compton Effect (Science History Publishers, 1975)

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  2. Messiah, A. Quantum Mechanics (Dover Publications, 1999)

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  1. Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology,

    Michael Segal

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  1. Michael Segal
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Segal, M. Just a moment. Nature Mater 9 (Suppl 1), S8–S9 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2642

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