What is the difference between absorption and scattering of light

Lathrop J. Frank Benford J. Richard A. Dobbins and G. Stephen Jizmagian J. Green J. Benjamin Rulf J. You do not have subscription access to this journal. Citation lists with outbound citation links are available to subscribers only.

You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution. Contact your librarian or system administrator or Login to access Optica Member Subscription. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. If the energy of the incident photon is high enough, it can knock an electron completely out of an atom, thereby ionising it.

At its most complicated, the interaction of light with matter entails many photons interacting not only with atoms, but with molecules and agglomerations of molecules and atoms, be they in solid, liquid, or gas form. The photons may be absorbed or scattered, or they may not interact with the material and pass straight through it. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer.

The photon and the atom interact only in terms of momentum conservation, the atom receives a recoil. In these terms it should be among elastic scattering. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name.

Humans have only their eyes as detectors, and eyes can only see the visible range. So we never suspected the existence of many other wavelengths. And it was the discovery and the use of these different waves that have really transformed technology—particularly during the period to —transformed society in many, many different ways because of the discovery of other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The only way for us to know about electromagnetic radiation is for it to interact with matter.

And all three you experience all the time in your daily life. Learn more about the nature of energy. Transmission is when an electromagnetic wave passes right through an object. So window glass is transparent to visible light.

Now, transmitted light can experience two important and related effects. First of all, the waves are often slightly bent. This is the phenomenon known as refraction. Refraction of light by a glass is the basis of all sorts of eyeglasses and optical devices, and you can see this phenomenon, of course, through a magnifying lens that you bend light, and therefore change the appearance of the object behind that lens.

We also use telescopes and microscopes, very important sort of devices. In addition, whenever light is transmitted through material, at least anything other than a vacuum, it slows down.

This is a remarkable phenomenon. The amount of that slowdown is directly related to the amount of refraction, the amount of bending that you see with the lens. A diamond is one of the highest indices of refraction.