Mathematical analysis of the photoelectric effect

Volker Bach, Frederic Klopp, Heribert Zenk

Published 2002-10-30Version 1

We study the photoelectric effect on the example of a simplified model of an atom with a single bound state, coupled to the quantized electromagnetic field. For this model, we show that Einstein's prediction for the photoelectric effect is qualitatively and quantitatively correct to leading order in the coupling parameter. More specifically, considering the ionization of the atom by an incident photon cloud consisting of $N$ photons, we prove that the total ionized charge is additive in the $N$ involved photons. Furthermore, if the photon cloud is approaching the atom from a large distance, the kinetic energy of the ejected electron is shown to be given by the difference of the photon energy of each single photon in the photon cloud and the ionization energy.