Construct · 1 fields · 2 citations
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Arthur H. Compton's 1923 paper A quantum theory of the scattering of X-rays by light elements established that when an X-ray or gamma-ray photon collides with a loosely bound or free electron, the photon hands part of its energy and momentum to the electron and scatters away with a longer wavelength, an increase that depends only on the scattering angle and not on the incident wavelength. Compton showed that this wavelength shift, later written with the electron's Compton wavelength as its natural scale, follows directly from treating light as discrete quanta that carry momentum, which gave decisive experimental support to the particle picture of light and earned him a share of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics. Oskar Klein and Yoshio Nishina's 1929 analysis then derived the full angular and energy dependence of the scattering probability, the Klein-Nishina cross-section, using Dirac's relativistic quantum theory of the electron, extending Compton's kinematic result into a complete quantitative account. As a landmark, Compton scattering is the canonical inelastic photon-electron interaction: it sets how much energy a photon can transfer in a single such collision, dominates the way medium-energy gamma rays lose energy passing through matter, and underlies techniques from gamma-ray spectroscopy to Compton imaging in medical and astronomical instruments.[1][2]
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