Tuesday | February 21 | 4:00 p.m. | Harvard-Jefferson 356

"The photon and its momentum... and a few problems we are still having with it"

Paul Lett

NIST

Recent experiments at MIT have confirmed that the recoil of an absorber in a dielectric medium is proportional to the index of refraction of the medium.  An experiment to answer the more philosophical question, "What is the momentum of a photon in a medium?" is the subject of a long-running debate between the proponents of the Abraham and Minkowski (and various other) formulations of the electromagnetic forces on a dielectric medium.  An experiment to explore this question and a measurement of the "Abraham force" using an atomic system will be discussed.