The simulation shows a charged particle moving through a transparent medium, visualizing the spherical light wavelets it emits at each point along its path and how those wavelets pile up into a cone of Cherenkov light once the particle's speed exceeds the local speed of light in the medium.
Choose a medium to set its refractive index, drag the particle-speed slider to push beta past the Cherenkov threshold, and press play to watch the wavefront cone form and its half-angle change as you adjust the speed.
Medium select (refractive index), particle-speed (beta) slider, play/pause, cone-angle readout
Cherenkov radiation is named after Soviet physicist Pavel Cherenkov, who first carefully characterized the effect in 1934 while investigating why gamma-irradiated liquids emitted a faint glow, work for which he shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics with theorists Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm, who explained the effect mathematically.
The simulation shows a charged particle moving through a transparent medium, visualizing the spherical light wavelets it emits at each point along its path and how those wavelets pile up into a cone of Cherenkov light once the particle's speed exceeds the local speed of light in the medium.
The simulation shows a charged particle moving through a transparent medium, visualizing the spherical light wavelets it emits at each point along its path and how those wavelets pile up into a cone of Cherenkov light once the particle's speed exceeds the local speed of light in the medium.
Choose a medium to set its refractive index, drag the particle-speed slider to push beta past the Cherenkov threshold, and press play to watch the wavefront cone form and its half-angle change as you adjust the speed.
Cherenkov radiation is named after Soviet physicist Pavel Cherenkov, who first carefully characterized the effect in 1934 while investigating why gamma-irradiated liquids emitted a faint glow, work for which he shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics with theorists Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm, who explained the effect mathematically.