Black-body Radiation - Spectrum

Spectrum

Black body radiation has a characteristic, continuous frequency spectrum that depends only on the body's temperature, called the Planck spectrum or Planck's law. The spectrum is peaked at a characteristic frequency that shifts to higher frequencies with increasing temperature, and at room temperature most of the emission is in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. As the temperature increases past about 500 degrees Celsius, black bodies start to emit significant amounts of visible light. Viewed in the dark, the first faint glow appears as a "ghostly" grey. With rising temperature, the glow becomes visible even when there is some background surrounding light: first as a dull red, then yellow, and eventually a "dazzling bluish-white" as the temperature rises. When the body appears white, it is emitting a substantial fraction of its energy as ultraviolet radiation. The sun, with an effective temperature of approximately 5800 °C, is an approximately black body with an emission spectrum peaked in the central, yellow-green part of the visible spectrum, but with significant power in the ultraviolet as well.

Black-body radiation provides insight into the thermodynamic equilibrium state of cavity radiation. If each Fourier mode of the equilibrium radiation in an otherwise empty cavity with perfectly reflective walls is considered as a degree of freedom capable of exchanging energy, then, according to the equipartition theorem of classical physics, there would be an equal amount of energy in each mode. Since there are an infinite number of modes this implies infinite heat capacity (infinite energy at any non-zero temperature), as well as an unphysical spectrum of emitted radiation that grows without bound with increasing frequency, a problem known as the ultraviolet catastrophe. Instead, in quantum theory the occupation numbers of the modes are quantized, cutting off the spectrum at high frequency in agreement with experiment and resolving the catastrophe. The study of the laws of black bodies and the failure of classical physics to describe them helped establish the foundations of quantum mechanics.