Abstract
The question of whether particles of light have mass has been asked in natural philosophy for centuries, starting with theories such as the corpuscular theory of Newton and contemporaries, based in turn on older ideas back to classical times. In the early twentieth century, Planck and Einstein introduced the concept of the photon, the quantum of light energy. It was proposed by Einstein and others, notably in about 1906, that the photon has mass. The behavior of a photon is strange. The aim of this work is to attempt to theoretically investigate the rest mass of a photon from Maxwell’s equation and Compton scattering theory. In this paper the equation of the electric field intensity in the presence of polarization in vacuum is derived. Maxwell's equations can describe state of electromagnetic waves in any medium. Their physical content is familiar; these equations are derived from the laws of electricity and magnetism. According to electromagnetic theory, the rest mass of photon in free space is zero and also photon has non-zero rest mass, as well as wavelength-dependent. To apply Maxwell's equations and Compton scattering theory this is modified to find the photon rest mass is of the order ~10-49 g which is comparable to that obtained by Coulomb experiment which is of the order ~10-44 g. Our theoretical work on the speculative mass of the photon must be experimentally verified and may open up plausible new applications in different fields.
Highlights
IntroductionThe wave theory of light was put forward by Huygens and was later decisively proved to be correct through discovery of interference and diffraction by Young and Fresnel
The idea that light consists of rapidly moving particle can be traced from the writing of ancient authors to Descartes and Newton
In view of equation (60) the photon rest mass is of the order ~ 10 0x g which is comparable to that obtained by Coulomb experiment which is of the order ~ 10 00g, it comparable to result for Mahendra Goray, Ramesh Naidu Annavarapu, they obtained the value of photon rest mass is 10-54 Kg [15]
Summary
The wave theory of light was put forward by Huygens and was later decisively proved to be correct through discovery of interference and diffraction by Young and Fresnel. Maxwell's theory of light as electromagnetic waves was one of the greatest achievements of the 19th century [1]. The history of the photon in 20th century started in 1901 with the formula by Planck for radiation of a black body and introduction of what was called later the quantum of action h. In 1902 Lenard discovered that energy of electrons in photoeffect does not depend on the intensity of light but depend on the wavelength of the later [2]. In 1905 Einstein pointed out that discovery of Lenard meant that energy of light is distributed in space not uniformly, but in a form of localized light quanta called photons
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