Probing Planck's law at home

Isabelle Bonnet (1) , J. Gabelli (2)

1 PCC - Laboratoire Physico-Chimie Curie [Institut Curie]
2 LPS - Laboratoire de Physique des Solides

We report on physics around an incandescent lamp. Using a consumer grade digital camera, we combine electrical and optical measurements to explore Planck's law of the black body radiation. This simple teaching experiment is successfully used to measure both Stefan's and Planck's constants. Our measurements lead to a strikingly accurate value for Planck's constant: h = 6.7±0.4×10 −34 kg.m 2 .s −1. A digital camera is thus a sufficiently good equipment to measure a constant directly related to quantum mechanics.

Domaines: Physique [physics]

Isabelle Bonnet, J. Gabelli. Probing Planck's law at home. European Journal of Physics, 2010, 31 (6), pp.1463-1471. ⟨10.1088/0143-0807/31/6/012⟩. ⟨hal-02454261⟩