EDITORIAL: World Year of Physics 2005 Focus on Photoemission and Electronic Structure

Details EDITORIAL: World Year of Physics 2005 Focus on Photoemission and Electronic Structure EDITORIAL: World Year of Physics 2005 Focus on Photoemission and Electronic Structure

Apr 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005njph....7......&link_type=abstract

New Journal of Physics, Volume 7, Issue 1, pp. (2005).

Physics

Scientific paper

Around the turn of the last century the scientific community was puzzled by experiments on the photoelectric effect reported in 1887 by Hertz. In 1905 Einstein gave the astonishing explanation in one blow: the light is quantized. This was the beginning of quantum theory and resulted in Einstein being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. It was however not until the 1960s that the photoelectric effect started to become a tool in research laboratories for basic science.
The access to new, sensitive electronic equipment and ultrahigh vacuum, together with more powerful computational physics, quickly saw photoelectron spectroscopy develop into a useful scientific technique. Soon sophisticated variants of the method appeared. In particular the use of synchrotron radiation led to the tunability of the light wavelength and the use of polarized radiation. In addition an enormous increase in brightness was obtained by using electron storage rings with undulators. Many new extensions have now been added, including detection of the spin and emission angle of the electrons.
Today photoemission is one of the major tools for detailed investigations of the electronic structure of matter and contributes heavily to our understanding of the properties of matter. For example it provides the complete set of quantum numbers for electrons in a solid and has been referred to as the `smoking gun' for solving difficult puzzles in condensed matter physics.
This celebratory Focus Issue on the application of the photoelectric effect in science shows examples of the rich variety of applications of the phenomenon explained by Einstein one hundred years ago.

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