IONIZATION BY QUANTIZED ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS: THE PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT

Abstract

In this paper, we explain the photoelectric effect in a variant of the standard model of non relativistic quantum electrodynamics, which is in some aspects more closely related to the physical picture, than the one studied in [5]. Now, we can apply our results to an electron with more than one bound state and to a larger class of electron-photon interactions. We will specify a situation, where the second order of ionization probability is a weighted sum of single photon terms. Furthermore, we will see that Einstein's equality [Formula: see text] for the maximal kinetic energy E kin of the electron, energy hν of the photon and ionization gap △E is the crucial condition, for these single photon terms to be nonzero.