El efecto fotoeléctrico: un estudio desde el punto de vista semi-clásico que permite su explicación sin hacer uso del concepto de cuanto de energía

Abstract

In 1905 Albert Einstein published his article “On a Heuristic View of the Production and Transformation of Light” where for the first time in the history of physics an explanation to the detachment of electrons from a metallic surface as a consequence of the incidence of a light ray on it at a certain frequency is given. The explanation was based on the contribution of Max Planck and his concept of photon as a corpuscle of light. In 1968 Willis E. Lamb Jr and Marlan O. Scully in their article “The photoelectric effect without photons” look for an explanation to the same effect studied and theorized by Einstein without resorting to the concept of photon which is replaced by a classical wave that will be the one in charge of stimulating the electrons of the atom until the point of releasing them. In this case, by using the interaction picture and the time-dependent perturbation theory, a probabilistic explanation of the radiation-matter interaction is presented. In this work, we reproduce the calculations carried out by Lamb and Scully. It is shown how from a semi-classical model the experimental results from the photoelectric effect can be explained in a similar fashion as the model based on the concept of photon does it.