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Ionisation with microwaves


pavelcherepan

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So I was chatting today with a colleague at work who is a it scared of radiation and scared of mobile phones since he'd read it somewhere that those can give you cancer. Obviously, I tried to explain him as well as I could that microwaves are not a type of ionising radiation and that the power output of mobile phone transmitter is not sufficient to produce damage through heating effects akin to what happens in a microwave oven.

 

Not sure whether that helped, but then I started thinking that I might not have been 100% correct. It's a tiny issue, but nit-picking is my thing :)

 

Anyway. Normally microwaves can't ionise atoms, the energy of the photon is not sufficient, but would it be possible for them on occasion to induce ionisation via quantum tunneling? I have a very vague understanding of QT and so just wanted to check whether my thinking is correct or not.

 

Cheers!

Edited by pavelcherepan
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