Audio Transcript Douglas Bonn, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Arjuna Neuman
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Corpus Infinitum – Audio Transcript Douglas Bonn, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman AUDIO TRANSCRIPT: Conversation with DOUGLAS BONN Interview took place… keywords: physics, quantum physics, waveforms DOUGLAS: ...B ecomes important when we talk about solids, so if you want to go from wind to earth to use the old separation, or really just to go from a gas to a solid how we talk about them changes a bit DENISE: O k , so let’s talk about the wave, the classical DOUGLAS: Right so sound is…the sound you know in air is a longitudinal wave, so it’s a compressional wave that’s high pressure/ low pressure, and it’s longitudinal meaning that the motion of the air molecules is in the same direction as the propagation of the wave. So that’s what sound is, a longitudinal wave involving compression and refraction of the air, so that’s sounds and it’s a phenomenon in air and water. But it also moves through solids in a similar way, but some other things can happen in solids that don’t happen in air and water. 1 Corpus Infinitum – Audio Transcript Douglas Bonn, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman DENISE: O k , and then I understand that the phonons are like the vibrations of the lattice, the crystal lattice, I think most solids are crystalline or what? DOUGLAS: Well not all solids are, but we mostly talk about crystalline solids because things are simpler there, so we usually start with the…we make choices about things that are going to be soluble, and one of the choices we make is to work on crystalline solids. So in air it was a vibration, so the air molecules are moving relative to one another and that’s a sound wave, in a solid your medium is different, so air, it’s this chaotic…the molecules are moving every which way, and within that chaos a wave can still propagate in an orderly way, but the molecules themselves are going every which way, in a crystalline solid the atoms are all held in a lattice, that is, that lattice is whatever the crystal structure that solid is. But you can have the same thing happen, now we don’t have them completely free to move, they’re sitting on a lattice and they’re jiggling around a little bit on their lattice. If you cool them down, they jiggle less and less and less because temperature is motion, but you can also propagate something like sound in that lattice and again you can have the same longitudinal compression wave. So you can have atoms pushing on one another and getting the propagation that way. 2 Corpus Infinitum – Audio Transcript Douglas Bonn, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman DENISE: O k so that’s how it works. DOUGLAS: Yes. But it can do other things. A solid can sustain sheer waves which a gas can’t. You’re recording sound but I will frequently resort to pictures if I can find my pen. (scribbles on whiteboard) So all a sound wave is doing is if you can imagine this (dotting marks on whiteboard) as my molecules… so, there’s more and less dense stretches of atoms, so it’s bunching up and it’s getting more diffuse, and this thing goes from bunchy to less bunchy, bunchy to less bunchy, so it’s oscillating and it’s propagating in that direction, so the bunching up direction is the same as the propagation direction, and that’s what we mean by a longitudinal wave. In a crystal lattice (drawing on whiteboard) so now we have our ions in a lattice, so they’re more organised but the same thing can happen, these ones could push together closer (drawing on whiteboard, marker squeaking) and these ones also get closer and in between further apart, and that can propagate that way. So that’s the same thing, it’s just in a more organised medium but a sheer wave can happen in a solid too, which is that (drawing on whiteboard) these ones can go this way, (drawing continues) but be propagating that way and that’s a transverse wave, so the motion of the atoms, the atoms are going up and down like this, but the waves propagating that way, so more like a… 3 Corpus Infinitum – Audio Transcript Douglas Bonn, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman ARJUNA: Like a sign code? DOUGLAS: Well like a wave on a wire, so the wave on a guitar string is a transverse wave, if you had an infinitely long string the waves travelling that way, but the wires moving this way, or a water surface, surface on water are water waves propagating one way but the water is moving that way, so solids can sustain transverse and longitudinal waves, so that’s actually different kinds of sound in a solid than in a liquid or a gas. ARJUNA: What determines whether it’s transversal or sheer or…? DOUGLAS: Well, you can launch any of them, so what determines it is what the motion is relative to the direction of propagation, so a solid can have sound waves of all, can have waves of all of these kinds. We reserve the term sound for the thing that just propagates longitudinally. DENISE: That’s the descriptor of the wave, of that particular wave, and the transversal one, does it have a name? DOUGLAS: They’re uh, if these are charged they’re called optic modes, and 4 Corpus Infinitum – Audio Transcript Douglas Bonn, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman that’s cos we can couple to them with light, cos light is an electromagnetic wave so if these are charged and they’re transverse they’re relatively easy to couple with light, so you can get photons interacting with phonons, is one thing you’re asking about the differentiation of so…the photon’s another wave, so it’s a transverse wave, but it’s kind of the weirdest wave for people to grasp, which is it’s a wave that has no medium. It doesn’t need a medium to propagate, it can propagate in empty space and it’s a self-sustaining electric field oscillating one way, a magnetic field oscillating the other way, and they keep each other going. So it’s a transverse electric and magnetic field propagating uh… DENISE: And the phonons, they need a medium to propagate? DOUGLAS: Yes, yes. Either a gas or a liquid which we just call sound, or in a solid you can have sound and then these other related kinds of waves. DENISE: Ok, since we’re talking about sound and photons, how about heat, how does heat waves… DOUGLAS: Well heat is, if I look at my solids, so heat is a random motion of these atoms, so the same motion that goes into sound is also related to heat, it’s just heat will be a random chaotic motion, 5 Corpus Infinitum – Audio Transcript Douglas Bonn, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman but gets more chaotic as you go in temperature. There’s a whole quantum mechanical description of this that’s a little bit different. DENISE: O h there’s quantum mechanical description of heat? Give me that (laughs) DOUGLAS: Well, so we, how would I…let me think about this. So now, I have these atoms on a lattice, so let me show you how I sketch it out quantum mechanically (wipes whiteboard with cloth). So, we would actually look at what’s called normal modes of this lattice, so what are all the different ways that this lattice can vibrate. And then we’ll categorise them according to momentum and energy, and momentum goes as one over the wavelength, so a low momentum wave is a very long wavelength, like a sound wave is a very long wavelength. For sound there is a linear relationship between those two, so a very long wavelength is down here, a short wavelength might be something where they’re going like this [sounds of marker scribbles on board] and the distance between motions this way and motions that way may be down at the scale of a single atom. So, way up here at very short wavelengths or high k’s we’re at length scales where single atoms are pushing against one another. And down here we’re at long length scales where there’s these sort of slow rolling motions through the solid. In quantum 6 Corpus Infinitum – Audio Transcript Douglas Bonn, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman mechanics on this discrete lattice, there isn’t a continuous line of these, there’s a bunch of discrete states. There may be a lot of them but they’re discrete, separate from one another. So what you do with temperature is that if you go to very, very low temperature they all stop, so there is no random motion except for a quantum mechanical thing called zero point motion, so even at absolute zero the theoretically lowest temperature you can get to in quantum mechanics the atoms still jiggle around a little bit. But then temperature is them jiggling around more, but in quantum mechanics what that means is that you have, you start occupying the higher energy states here. So as you add more thermal energy to a system, you start to populate the higher states, rather than them all sitting down in some low state. So temperature in a quantum mechanical view is something that let’s things thermally occupy more energetic states, whereas at low temperatures they will sit down at lower states.