At what point does an RF photon change to DC?

[BrianHG]

Wouldn't a 0hz photon source just be a stationary magnet?

Damn, a stationary non-spinning Magnitar would be some bloody hell of a purely true all powerful 0hz photon source.

If you were to spin a magnet at 60 RPM would it not give you a 1 Hz signal?
If it does, then wouldn't slowing the magnet down to stationary create that actual DC photon?
Would this also mean that all stationary magnets in the universe, (I know nothing is truly stationary due to the expansion of space, motion of galaxies and ect) that we have something that many example material in the universe giving off what looks like a 0hz, or DC photon source?

I guess what I am trying to get at is an RF photon change to DC once it is a stationary magnetic source...

[T3sl4co1l]

I see where you are coming from but in my question the photon is a real wave/particle "thing" moving at the speed of light with a certain energy/wavelength and existing for some time (our time since it doesn't experience time). So when we slow the oscillation down to 1Hz a photon(s) is (are) given off. When we slow down to once an hour are there photons continually given off like a beam of photons?

Oh, hell yah.

Like, unimaginable numbers of photons.

When you flip a light switch, that's on the order of 10^20 photons per second.  With frequencies around ~5 x 10^14 Hz.

A 100W power amplifier at 1Hz is presumably ferrying around a quantity of photons in the 10^34 range, per second.

Physicists are happy to convert a summation into an integral when it's just billions of particles.  10^34?  That might as well be infinite.  Oh yah.  It's very "continuous", as a physicist might say.

More important is that there's no useful concept of photons confined within wires.  Photons are about propagating modes in free space.  Photons interacting with condensed matter is extremely complex.  Photons interact with pretty much every particle and quasiparticle (phonons, because electron-phonon and photon-phonon scattering are things) in that solid.  Casually tack on another 10^30 interactions in the course of the process!

To even conceive of photons propagating in space, interacting with the vacuum only, one needs free space in which to propagate -- and a ~1Hz/1s wavelet cannot be reasonably said to be "free" until it has light-seconds of free space to do so.  That's a lot of interplanetary medium, or interstellar or intergalactic for that matter.  Perhaps out in the enormous voids between galactic superclusters, a photon of this wavelength could reasonably be considered "free"?  But such environments are, ah, rather inaccessible to science, so it's not a very useful question anymore.

I mention interactions, because the particle model is only useful on the most fundamental level, of single particle interactions.  It's simply not useful in any kind of bulk media.  Again, there's nothing important about the particle model.  The classical wave model captures everything of interest in this situation.

My brain experiment is breaking down without more knowledge about photon emission.

Because you're forcing far too much importance into a model, which is unreasonable to use for the situation.   Embrace the wave, let it wash over you (or through you, as the electromagnetic case may be).

Tim

[MrW0lf]

Glad to see less than religious viewpoints. It is important to understand that there is little to no understanding about inner workings. Only "black box" models that provide basic functionality spec for physics engine
If dig deep enough can find that basic spec is erroneous for tricky situations not handled in "common knowledge".
For example cannot be excluded that magnetic field is imaginary concept and exact same effects can be explained only by complex electric field interactions.
Also in quantum physics some "digital magic" can be explained using complex structures based on classical physics concepts in 3D interactions.
Problem is "complex" part. When theories emerged there was mostly no other computation power available than human brain which led to simplification and "helper concepts".
One simple example: if wind veeeeery long and thin air core solenoid it has solenoidal mag. field only from very close up. If measure from further away it has basically same field that straight wire, but different field propagation velocity. Now if think little about this some ideas may emerge how charges are moving in regular wire. However when take some random pic about "moving charges in a wire" you get funny balls with vectors parallel to wire.
There is no monopoly on truth so anyone in a shed may think & analyze & experiment and emerging theories have no less right to life than "official" ones.

[Zero999]

A photon of zero frequency will either have an electric or magnetic field, not both. Everything in the entire universe will be in the near field region and therefore experience the same, constant electric or magnetic bias.

As energy level goes down, the number of photons per second, for a given amount of power, increases, so it becomes increasingly difficult to count the photons individually. It's much easier to count the photons from a small UV laser, operating at 1000THz, than it is do with an RF transmitter working at 1000Hz.

[A Hellene]

Please, excuse my philosophical tangent but, are we talking about the Aitheric realm?

I am talking about ?? [Aither] (from the verb ? [aitho], meaning to scorch), this 'undetectable' fluid (see the latest theories of 'Dark Energy' / 'Dark Matter' that our eyes and testing equipment cannot seem to be able to be detecting) our universe is immersed into; this strange sea of charges, where the joules our power plants and batteries being send to us propagate into, via the wave-guides we call power cables? It is very well accepted today that the speed of the free electrons in a usual intersection of copper wire of 1.0mm2, for example, is a few centimetres per hour per Ampere... Taking it a step further, it seems to be giving an answer to what really happens around every electrical line carrying electric charges, the 'surface charges' which are tightly connected to electric fields while they should never be confused with the 'skin effect' that is relevant to magnetic fields and appears in cases of (high frequency, mostly) alternating current through a conductor.

Aither was firstly introduced by Plato in Timaeus and was briefly described by Aristotle as the [pempousia] (= ? ??), literally: the fifth element, or, as the Romans later called it, the Quintessence. This very realm was extensively supported later by Nikola Tesla's resonant coil single-wire transmission lines, widely known as they are colloquially being called, the Tesla Coils.

Even that more-than-famous plagiarist, the globally accepted (false-)god of science whose theories have been debunked, used to support the Aitheric realm before he chose to take the other path, along with the Cantorian gang (Georg Cantor, David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Ernst Mach, etc., with their miserably failed 'SetTheory' and the perennially failed 'Distorted Spacetime') that rewrote Physics by ruthlessly obliterating the (two-dimensional / flat space) Euclidean Geometry... Not to mention their same gang mates, Heaviside (that non-Academic tool who detested potentials and stated that they 'should be murdered from the theory'), Gibbs, and Hertz for reducing 12 of Maxwell's 20 equations with 20 variables each to four simple equations with just four variables, that we are taught now as Maxwell's equations even if they are not...


-George


P.S. I am sorry for the unreadable characters, above, but the forum software seems that it still refuses to support Greek language characters...

[MrW0lf]

For me question is aether/physical vacuum/etc a substance or information about state of matter. Quantum teleportation for example is only about information Tx/Rx, so process as such is possible. Things also become interesting if go search for special cases where there are forces on charges but no net magnetic field - on quite macroscopic level. That also hints that there is information in space at location X,Y,Z just like with gravity. Objects know how to behave at specific point in space w/o any detectable delay.

[IanMacdonald]

At any time it feels like it. Look mate, we particles work to Quantum rules, so you humans with your deadlines and schedules can sod off.   

-and don't start about being him a wave either. They're entitled to join the union.

[CatalinaWOW]

While there is no conceptual reason I am aware of to deny very long wavelength, low energy photons there are other reasons that the concept is not very useful.  Scale reasons.  When the energy of a single photon is several orders of magnitude below the thermal noise the ability to actually observe the disturbance totally disappears.  Too bad because it would be interesting to watch the disturbance as something that takes hours to go by at the speed of light passes.

There are also boundary condition problems as the wavelengths approach the scale of the universe.  Just have to play in the much smaller sandbox we can really work with.  Drats, only about 20-30 orders of magnitude to play with.

[Beamin]

I guess my question is:

If you had a very long antenna with thousands of watts into it and a very long receiver antenna that could measure without noise and you turned the two on what would happen?

So you start at 100hz and start turning down the frequency what would you see on the receiver as you got down below 1hz? Would you see a continuous stream of photons (electrons from the antenna flowing into the receiver) or would you just see pulses as the moment the +and- switched back and fourth? How long would this pulse last? This is actually a doable experiment. And I'm sure if it wasn't done mathematical or smaller scale model have revealed the answer. Since 1hz is a long time given the limits of our technology when you shut off the transmitter when exactly does the photon beam stop?

I get what you are saying about how the photon shouldn't be looked at as a "thing" when you get near the limits like how an electron has mass but no size or a virtual particle is not a particle at all but rather a disturbance in it respective field that is out of phase with normal particles and therefore passes through them without consequence instead of amplifying or cancelling the "wave" of the real particle.

[T3sl4co1l]

Would you see a continuous stream of photons (electrons from the antenna flowing into the receiver) or would you just see pulses as the moment the +and- switched back and fourth? How long would this pulse last?

I already answered this: the stream is continuous, on the order of 10^30 / sec.

The photons are all in phase, and have a spectral and spacial extent corresponding to the bandwidth of the transmitter.

This is actually a doable experiment.

You're going completely the wrong way.

It is a doable experiment in the THz, where cryogenically cooled superconducting devices are sensitive enough to resolve quanta, while the frequencies are low enough for classical conductor and dielectric antennas to be useful.

It's even easier at optical frequencies, where quanta are nearly resolvable by eye (the human eye is something like 10-100 times too insensitive / noisy to properly resolve it), and easily measured as shot noise through various devices (photodiodes, PMTs, etc.).

There is most certainly no nonlinearity about the situation.  A beam is coherent, with well defined spacial and spectral extents.  There is no invocation of temporal events here.  Again, it's about frequency, not time.

Only very specific conditions can yield photon bunches that are temporally coherent: lasers are such an example.  Again, these are not harmonic processes, the waveform is always smooth and continuous.  The result is a tone burst or wavelet, which can also be represented as a superposition of frequencies over a range.

It is not meaningful to consider a very precise time event, because the wave is spread out over as much time and distance as its frequency implies.  Heisenberg uncertainty principle.  Which is also identical and equivalent to the duality between temporal and spectral uncertainty with the Fourier transform: the longer duration a wavelet has, the narrower (more precise) its spectrum is, and vice versa.  A sine wave has infinite temporal extent (it neither starts nor stops, at all), and zero bandwidth (perfectly known frequency).

Tim

[Doc Daneeka]

well another thing to think about is what you would see from an arbitrarily low frequency source of photons: as the frequency gets lower the energy in each photon gets lower. if you are transmitting with a constant power then the rate of photons must go up inversely with the frequency. As you turn down the frequency you get more and more photons and it will get harder and harder to tell them apart...

[hermit]

If I follow this correctly, and that is a big IF, this is really semantics used for models.  We have ways of measuring certain things and use these measurements to build models to predict behavior.  Photons travel by wave propagation.  So therefore, it will never be DC by definition.  Well, maybe fluctuating DC?  You can't separate the photon from its mode of propagation as if it were an electron and do a selective measurement at one point and proclaim that you know it's properties from that measurement.  It seems this is what you are trying to do.

I read a long time ago, before the WWW and have never been able to find the source on the web, that scientists were able to coax a single electron through a conductor if it was curved.  ie, wave shaped.  Even electron DC current may not be what you think it is.

[Beamin]

So I think you can answer my question:
We have the trans and receiver where the transmitter is controlled by a freq. gen that can make perfect sine waves and has a "pause or hold" button on it where when we press it the voltage is held at that position of the wave. Its a 20v 10A 200 watt transitter.

Our control is to turn the 1Hz signal on for 10 sec and we detect a 10 sec long radio signal of 1hz on the receiver.
So 0.0 -0.25 sec the signal gen goes from 0 to +10volts at 10 amps.
0.25-0.5 sec it goes from +10 to zero
0.5-0.75 sec 0 to -10v
0.75 -1.0 sec -10 to 0 and repeats for ten seconds

On our second run we do the same thing only at 0.25 sec we press the hold button.

On our third run we press the hold button at 5.25 seconds.

So we should see
Test #1 10 seconds of 1 hz signal on receiver
Test #2 0.25 seconds of 1hz signal  "
Test #3 5.25 "                          "
But we really should see:
#1 10 sec of signal
#2 no signal
#3 5 seconds of signal since the transmitter never made a full ac cycle after 5 sec.

Unless the photon only are produced(in time dimension) when a change happens like at the thresh holds where the cycle changes. You could change this to any frequency as long as you could press the hold button fast enough to catch it mid cycle and the resolution of you receiver was an order of magnitude better then the freq you are receiving.

[T3sl4co1l]

Again:

A 10s burst of 1Hz has a sinc(f) spectrum centered around 1Hz, with an uncertainty of about 0.1Hz (there's a factor of pi in there, too).

You can time the waveform, detect the peaks or zero crossings, and find that it's pretty damn close to 1.00Hz, sure -- but that's a special case.  A detector is a nonlinear process.  It's not general.  By using a detector, you destroy other information about the signal.  If you want its amplitude, for example, you have to start over, using the original signal.

The concept of photons lives in the frequency domain, so it's the spectrum that matters.

If you "pause" the waveform, then you are superimposing a wave burst (as above) with a DC offset (similarly windowed).  The resulting spectrum around 1Hz is identical.  What you've added is another sinc(f) term, centered around 0Hz (because it's a "burst" of DC).  Where the tails of those two spectra overlap (i.e., significant in the 0.5Hz range, 5th harmonic range as it were), the phase and timing matters, because of interference.  You'd have to run the numbers for that particular waveform to find out.

But in any case, this is all undergrad level signals analysis.  Fourier transforms.  Not even any need to invoke any physics.  All physics can tell you is that, yeah, there's an uncountable* number of particles going around, and you don't need to worry about it.

*In the practical sense, i.e., today, not only can we not design a detector for energy levels this small, but we can't design a detector capable of the rate (particles/sec), or count it in a reasonable time frame (10^30 requires around 100 bits -- a long int even on a 64-bit machine!).

Tim