Investigating the properties of Planck's radiation law through theoretical and numerical studies

Abstract: A black body is an ideal object that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation and simultaneously emits radiation that only depends on the temperature. The radiation is described by Planck's radiation law and its maximum by Wien's displacement law. The aim of this project is to study Planck's and Wien's laws in the frequency and wavelength domains, by theoretical studies and numerical studies in the programming language Python. Planck's law can be derived by regarding a cavity where the internal radiation either can be regarded as waves or as a gas of photons. In this study, the main focus lies in the derivation assuming radiation can be treated as waves, which uses the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. This derivation is also used when the radiation is simulated numerically in Python. The numerical studies use the stochastic method "hit and miss" to generate the different properties of the emitted radiation. Planck's law occurs in many different forms, the differences between some of them is explained in this project. When transforming between the domains one must use a Jacobian. If this is forgotten Wien's law, which is derived from Planck’s law, efficiently shows how the peaks of the correct and the transformed curves are at different positions. The results show that Planck's law accurately can be derived numerically. Even though the chosen method successfully reproduces the Planck distribution the program can be improved by using the inverse transform method for sampling. To study this subject further one could consider deriving and simulating the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.