- #1
JulienB
- 408
- 12
Homework Statement
Hi everybody! I just did the photoelectric experiment this week, and I have a report to write about it. We used a mercury vapour lamp, a set of metal interference filters and a grey filter in order to find the intersection point (and therefore ##U_{g,max}## between the curves (with and without grey filter) for each wavelength as the current is changing.
The experiment went very well except for the filter ##492##nm, where the curves look kind of flat making the intersection point harder to find. Our advisor said there is an explanation that we must give in our report.
Let me know if you need more informations about the experiment. I am assuming it is a pretty standard one that many of you probably already performed, but I might be wrong.
Homework Equations
##e \cdot U_{g,max} = h \cdot \nu - e \cdot \phi_A##
The Attempt at a Solution
So the first thing I've done was to search for the spectral lines of mercury (see attached file), and what I found was that the peak is not very pronounced at ##492##nm. But what does that mean physically? I've googled it but could not find anything tangible yet. My guess would be that for some quantum reason I do not know, fewer electrons are released from the mercury atom at that wavelength than for others. That is still pretty vague, and maybe wrong... Any help?Thanks a lot in advance for your answers.Julien.