Following ideas provided an important step toward a more complete understanding of blackbody radiation is given below
Step-by-step explanation:
- Planck wanted to understand black body radiation.
- The black body may be modeled by a box, with a small hole.
- We heat the box up, wait for the system to reach a stationary state (at a fixed temperature), and see what kind of electromagnetic radiation (intensity as a function of frequency) comes out of the hole. In ,
- Rayleigh and Jeans3 tried to apply classical mechanics to this problem, and they calculated correctly that the black body would emit the electromagnetic radiation with a distribution of frequencies.
- However, the larger the frequency, the larger its intensity - an absurd conclusion, what is known as an ultraviolet catastrophe.
- All materials emit light. A tungsten metal wire can illuminate a room with black body radiation at 2800 K. Black body radiation is a combination of spontaneous and stimulated emission from an array of thermally excited oscillators.
- Planck‘s radiation law describing this phenomenon is considered to be the foundation for modern physics and quantum theory. While no material behaves exactly as a black body, all emit light by this mechanism. External energy in the form of heat enters the materials system, and light is emitted to maintain a steady-state, constant temperature.