Amplitude
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Amplitude
I understand that the wavelength and frequency of a wave share an inverse relationship with each other, but does amplitude have anything to do with this relationship as well? In other words, what is the relationship between amplitude and wavelength and amplitude and frequency?
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Re: Amplitude
Amplitude is just how high and conversely how low the wave can go. Thinking about it in an analogical way, if you throw a ball, how high up you throw it doesn't really affect how far it goes in the sideways direction. in the same manner, how high up the amplitude of a wave goes doesn't really reflect what its wavelength will be, or its frequency.
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Re: Amplitude
Since amplitude is not included in the equations that were taught to us, I don't think we should worry about it. Like you said, the most important concept is that as wavelength goes down, frequency goes up and vice versa.
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Re: Amplitude
Amplitude isn't all that important for these calculations. However, amplitude of a wave is the same as intensity of light.
Re: Amplitude
Amplitude is just how high and low the wave goes but this isn't present in the equations we were given in class. I don't think it is as important as wavelength and frequency in this class.
From physics, the amplitude could be calculated using sine, but I don't think we are going to use that in this class.
From physics, the amplitude could be calculated using sine, but I don't think we are going to use that in this class.
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Re: Amplitude
The only time I really noticed amplitude making a difference was in constructive and destructive interference, because it seemed to increase in constructive and decrease in destructive.
Re: Amplitude
Megan_1F wrote:What is the relationship between amplitude and intensity of light?
According to the school Physics website, "The intensity of a wave depends on its energy and the energy varies in a different way from the amplitude.". Hope this helped.
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Re: Amplitude
Megan_1F wrote:What is the relationship between amplitude and intensity of light?
Sometime light is described at a wavelike model, and in waves we see that when we increase the amplitude/intensity, we would be increasing the strength of those waves. However, remember that light has both wave like features and particle like features. As shown in the photoelectric effect, when the scientists increased the amplitude/intensity of the light, sometimes they didn't always see any electrons coming out of the metal. The reason for that unusual result was the fact that by increasing the amplitude/intesntiy, you would just be increasing the number of photons. The scientists weren't increasing the actual strength of each photon but just increasing the quantity. We also learned in the lectures that it's always one photon per one electron, so it would make sense that increasing the number of photons doesn't actually do anything if each photon doesn't have enough energy to overcome the threshold energy of each electron.
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Re: Amplitude
Megan_1F wrote:What is the relationship between amplitude and intensity of light?
According to the same website as the comment above,"The intensity of a wave is proportional to the square of its amplitude." It's more of a physics concept so it's not likely that amplitude will be relevant to calculations in this class.
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Re: Amplitude
I feel that amplitude is focused more in physics and not in chemistry so I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Re: Amplitude
Amplitude just indicates how high or low the waves themselves travel. But in terms of its relationship to frequency and wavelength, it probably doesn't matter as amplitude isn't present in the equations that we've been using so far.
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