In addition to carrying energy, light transports momentum and is capable of exerting mechanical forces on objects. When an electromagnetic wave is absorbed by an object, the wave exerts a pressure (P) on the object that equals the wave’s irradiance (I) divided by the speed of light (c): P = I/c newtons per square metre.

Most natural light sources exert negligibly small forces on objects; this subtle effect was first demonstrated in 1903 by the American physicists Ernest Fox Nichols and Gordon Hull. However, radiation pressure is consequential in a number of astronomical settings. Perhaps most important, the equilibrium conditions of stellar structure are determined largely by the opposing forces of gravitational attraction on the one hand and radiation pressure and thermal pressure on the other. The outward force of the light escaping the core of a star, working with thermal pressure, acts to balance the inward gravitational forces on the outer layers of the star. Another, visually dramatic, example of radiation pressure is the formation of cometary tails, in which dust particles released by cometary nuclei are pushed by solar radiation into characteristic trailing patterns.

Terrestrial applications of radiation pressure became feasible with the advent of lasers in the 1960s. In part because of the small diameters of their output beams and the excellent focusing properties of the beams, laser intensities are generally orders of magnitude larger than the intensities of natural light sources. On the largest scale, the most powerful laser systems are designed to compress and heat target materials in nuclear fusion inertial confinement schemes. The radiation forces from table-top laser systems are used to manipulate atoms and microscopic objects. The techniques of laser cooling and trapping, pioneered by the Nobelists Steven Chu, William Phillips, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, slow a gas of atoms in an “optical molasses” of intersecting laser beams. Temperatures below 10⁻⁶ K (one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero) have been achieved. “Optical tweezers” is a related technique in which a tightly focused laser beam exerts a radiation force large enough to deflect, guide, and trap micron-sized objects ranging from dielectric spheres to biological samples such as viruses, single living cells, and organelles within cells.

Interactions of light with matter

The transmission of light through a piece of glass, the reflections and refractions of light in a raindrop, and the scattering of sunlight in Earth’s atmosphere are examples of interactions of light with matter. On an atomic scale, these interactions are governed by the quantum mechanical natures of matter and light, but many are adequately explained by the interactions of classical electromagnetic radiation with charged particles.

A detailed presentation of the classical model of an interaction between an electromagnetic wave and an atom can be found in the article electromagnetic radiation. In brief, the electric and magnetic fields of the wave exert forces on the bound electrons of the atom, causing them to oscillate at the frequency of the wave. Oscillating charges are sources of electromagnetic radiation; the oscillating electrons radiate waves at the same frequency as the incoming fields. This constitutes the microscopic origin of the scattering of an electromagnetic wave. The electrons initially absorb energy from the incoming wave as they are set in motion, and they redirect that energy in the form of scattered light of the same frequency.

Through interference effects, the superposition of the reradiated waves from all of the participating atoms determines the net outcome of the scattering interactions. Two examples illustrate this point. As a light beam passes through transparent glass, the reradiated waves within the glass interfere destructively in all directions except the original propagation direction of the beam, resulting in little or no light’s being scattered out of the original beam. Therefore, the light advances without loss through the glass. When sunlight passes through Earth’s upper atmosphere, on the other hand, the reradiated waves generated by the gaseous molecules do not suffer destructive interference, so that a significant amount of light is scattered in many directions. The outcomes of these two scattering interactions are quite different, primarily because of differences in the densities of the scatterers. Generally, when the mean spacing between scatterers is significantly less than the wavelength of the light (as in glass), destructive interference effects significantly limit the amount of lateral scattering; when the mean spacing is greater than, or on the order of, the wavelength and the scatterers are randomly distributed in space (as in the upper atmosphere), interference effects do not play a significant role in the lateral scattering.

Lord Rayleigh’s analysis in 1871 of the scattering of light by atoms and molecules in the atmosphere showed that the intensity of the scattered light increases as the fourth power of its frequency; this strong dependence on frequency explains the colour of the sunlit sky. Being at the high-frequency end of the visible spectrum, blue light is scattered far more by air molecules than the lower-frequency colours; the sky appears blue. On the other hand, when sunlight passes through a long column of air, such as at sunrise or sunset, the high-frequency components are selectively scattered out of the beam and the remaining light appears reddish.

Nonlinear interactions

The interactions of light waves with matter become progressively richer as intensities are increased. The field of nonlinear optics describes interactions in which the response of the atomic oscillators is no longer simply proportional to the intensity of the incoming light wave. Nonlinear optics has many significant applications in communications and photonics, information processing, schemes for optical computing and storage, and spectroscopy.

Nonlinear effects generally become observable in a material when the strength of the electric field in the light wave is appreciable in comparison with the electric fields within the atoms of the material. Laser sources, particularly pulsed sources, easily achieve the required light intensities for this regime. Nonlinear effects are characterized by the generation of light with frequencies differing from the frequency of the incoming light beam. Classically, this is understood as resulting from the large driving forces of the electric fields of the incoming wave on the atomic oscillators. As an illustration, consider second harmonic generation, the first nonlinear effect observed in a crystal (1961). When high-intensity light of frequency f passes through an appropriate nonlinear crystal (quartz was used in the first observations), a fraction of that light is converted to light of frequency 2f. Higher harmonics can also be generated with appropriate media, as well as combinations of frequencies when two or more light beams are used as input.