100 Years of Photoemission

APR 01, 1988

A century of scientific struggle has given us powerful photoemission spectroscopies for probing electronic structure and has brought us to the threshold of great advances based on new, high‐brightness sources of synchroton radiation.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881150

Giorgio Margaritondo

With these words, Heinrich Hertz announced in 1887 the discovery of the photoelectric effect. Although he realized that the phenomenon was important, he certainly could not have imagined how fundamental its role in physics was to be over the next 100 years. Even now, many physicists do not completely understand that role. For example, the effect is often, but incorrectly, credited with leading Albert Einstein to the quantization of the electromagnetic field. Photoemission experiments actually made their most important contributions to field quantization after Einstein had formulated the theory, by demonstrating its validity.

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More about the Authors

Giorgio Margaritondo. University of Wisconsin, Madison.