For electromagnetic waves we have the photon association, one imagines light as
ID: 1378583 • Letter: F
Question
For electromagnetic waves we have the photon association, one imagines light as particles "flying around".
What is the analogy for a constant electrical field, one which doesn't change in time and maybe not even in space? What shold I "imagine" the photons (or probably some non-particle like superposition of these photons) doing, if the situation is static.
How I came up with this is really through the following question:
Let's say I have two parallel capacitor plates and between these is just vacuum, except for one single atom. Can I "turn on" the capacitor in a way which ionizes the atom? Can I "tackle" the atom from the left by turning on a homogenous electrical field and would that depend on the turning on-velocity?
Explanation / Answer
The photon is the particle that carries the electromagnetic force i.e. charges exert a force on each other by exchanging virtual photons.
In your example of a capacitor one plate has a positive charge and the other has a negative charge, and the two plates are continuously exchanging virtual photons, which causes the attractive force between the two plates. Your atom in between the plates can interact with the virtual photons, and indeed if you ramp up the field strength there will come a point where the atom ionises. The electron will whizz off towards the positive plate and the positively charged ion will whizz off towards the negatively charged plate.
But whether this is really analogous to the photoelectric effect I'm not sure. In your capacitor the photons are virtual and you can't simply claim a virtual photon hits the atom and ionises it like a real photon hitting a metal surface. Hopefully someone who knows more than me about quantum electrodynamics can comment.
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