Photoelectric effect

[Ayla3H]

How come a wave is not able to dislocate an electron? Is it because of an inherent property that waves have?

[Sammy Liu]

How come a wave is not able to dislocate an electron? Is it because of an inherent property that waves have?

I don't completely understand the question, but the photoelectric effect is strictly regarding light and how it can eject electrons. Light itself is both a wave and a particle. This is known as the wave-particle duality, where it behaves as both a wave and a photon.

[EDIT] I know understand what you're asking.
In the traditional model of light, where it is modeled as a wave, physicists predicted that increasing the light amplitude (intensity) would result in more electrons being ejected.
However, experiments found that instead of more electrons being ejected, the same amount of electrons were ejected but with more kinetic energy (they were ejected with a greater velocity).
Because of this, Einstein proposed that light behaves like a particle. This model would correctly predict the relationship between the light that is exposed to the substance and the electrons being ejected from the substance.

[Madison Nguyen 3L]

Hello!
In relation to the photoelectric effect and subsequent experiment, light modeled as a wave have electrons that have wavelike properties; and thus, they are only able to ejected from a metal when the frequency, not the intensity, of the light source is increased. When the intensity and amplitude is increased, the number of photons increases, but not the energy per photon. Thus, the actual kinetic energy of the electron that is being ejected does not increases, being that the its threshold energy is not being matched with (or is lesser than) E, aka the energy per photon (E = h x light frequency).
If the frequency is increased, then E is equivalent or greater than that of the energy to remove electrons, leading to the ejection of electrons, aka the electrons being removed at a greater velocity at ((1/2) M x V^2).

[Rio Gagnon 1G]

In the photoelectric experiment, light was shined on a metal surface to measure the energy needed to eject electrons. Long wavelength/low frequency light did not have enough energy to eject electrons, however, if light only acted as a wave, in theory, increasing the intensity should strengthen the energy of the light enough to eject an electron. However, this was proven to not be the case, showing that light must also have particle-like properties. The photoelectric effect states that each photon in light must be able to overcome the threshold energy in order to eject electrons, which is why increasing the intensity of low frequency light would not work.