Photoelectric effect
Simulation
Fig. 5: Overview of the PhET applet 'Photoelectric Effect'.
http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/photoelectric
The applet on the web sites above is free to use and requires only the JAVA Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on your computer. It can be downloaded for free as well here.
You may run the applet both online (select 'Run now') and offline (select 'Download' and run the file 'photoelectric_en.jar' any time later).
With the running applet, study and describe what happens while you:
- are changing the voltage,
- are changing the wavelength,
- are changing the light intensity (or the number of photons, if selected in the menu 'Options'),
- have selected another metal as the target.
Furthermore, you may study the volt-ampere characteristics of the phototube with an unknown photocathode. (Select '???' as the target and read several values of the voltage and the corresponding photocurrent.)