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How does photon energy change as light wavelength increases?
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When white light is spread apart by a prism or a diffraction grating, the colours of the visible spectrum appear. The colours vary according to their wavelengths. Violet has the highest frequencies and shortest wavelengths, and red has the lowest frequencies and the longest wavelengths.
In physics, the energy of a photon is inversely proportional to its wavelength. This means that as the wavelength of light increases, the energy of the individual photons decreases.41
This relationship is defined by the equation , where is the energy, is Planckās constant, and is the frequency. Because frequency and wavelength are inversely related (), a longer wavelength corresponds to a lower frequency, which in turn results in lower photon energy. Conversely, shorter wavelengths are associated with higher frequencies and higher energy photons.2341