PHOTON SCATTERING

75

watching the signs carefully, we discover that terms proportional to cancel too (use I I I = 1) leaving terms proportional to 2 . We obtain d 2 4 = r2 e m d A x I I x A + A x I I x A EI E A
2

(2.102) The units of the right and left hand side of Equation (2.102) are length squared, so we do not need to insert powers of or c. Note that we must sum over all possible intermediate states I of the system A and we must do that before we square. Note too that the matrix elements in the terms are proportional to the (transition) electric dipole moments of the system A, a consequence of our dipole (or long wavelength) approximation. The cross section is proportional to 4 and thus inversely proportional to 4 due to the cancellation of the terms proportional to discussed earlier. Had this cancellation not happened, the cross section would have been proportional to 2 and thus inversely proportional to 2 . For atoms in colorless gases the energy difference |EI EA | corresponds to the ultraviolet (wavelengths less than blue light) region so the approximation |EI EA | is valid. The dependence of the elastic scattering of light was discovered by Rayleigh using classical electromagnetism with wavelengths in the optical region. The absence of in Equation (2.102) is the reason that Rayleigh was able to derive the formula without the use of Quantum Physics. The strong dependence upon wavelength is responsible for the blue sky and red sunsets. Short wavelength (blue) light gets scattered much more than long wavelength (red) light. So if you look at a part of the sky away from the sun, light must scatter off molecules in the atmosphere to reach your eyes and mostly blue light will reach them. Looking at the sunset the opposite happens. Scattering will preferentially remove blue light leaving the red to reach your eyes.

2.4.4 Thomson Scattering

In Thomson scattering we are dealing with elastic scattering with photon energies much larger than typical energy differences between levels in the |EI EA |. Because EI EA appear in the target. Thus we have = denominators of the second and third terms of Equation (2.94), the rst term with AB dominates and we have d = r2 e (k) (k ) d
2

(2.103)

Note that elastic scattering requires |k| = |k | but not = . The cross section depends upon the angle between (k) and (k ) and not directly upon the angle between k and k (the scattering angle). This makes for