information:classification
Black body

All normal (baryonic) matter emits electromagnetic radiation when it has a temperature above absolute zero. The radiation represents a conversion of a body's internal energy into electromagnetic energy, and is therefore called thermal radiation. It is a spontaneous process of radiative distribution of entropy.

Conversely, all normal matter absorbs electromagnetic radiation to some degree. An object that absorbs all radiation falling on it, at all wavelengths, is called a black body. When a black body is at a uniform temperature, its emission has a characteristic frequency distribution that depends on the temperature. Its emission is called blackbody radiation.

The concept of the black body is an idealization, as perfect black bodies do not exist in nature. However, graphite and lamp black, with emissivities greater than 0.95, are good approximations to a black material. Experimentally, blackbody radiation may be established best as the ultimately stable steady state equilibrium radiation in a cavity in a rigid body, at a uniform temperature, that is entirely opaque and is only partly reflective. A closed box with walls of graphite at a constant temperature with a small hole on one side produces a good approximation to ideal blackbody radiation emanating from the opening.

Blackbody radiation has the unique absolutely stable distribution of radiative intensity that can persist in thermodynamic equilibrium in a cavity. In equilibrium, for each frequency, the intensity of radiation which is emitted and reflected from a body relative to other frequencies (that is, the net amount of radiation leaving its surface, called the spectral radiance) is determined solely by the equilibrium temperature and does not depend upon the shape, material or structure of the body. For a black body (a perfect absorber) there is no reflected radiation, and so the spectral radiance is entirely due to emission. In addition, a black body is a diffuse emitter (its emission is independent of direction).

Blackbody radiation becomes a visible glow of light if the temperature of the object is high enough. The Draper point is the temperature at which all solids glow a dim red, about 798 K. At 1000 K, a small opening in the wall of a large uniformly heated opaque-walled cavity (such as an oven), viewed from outside, looks red; at 6000 K, it looks white. No matter how the oven is constructed, or of what material, as long as it is built so that almost all light entering is absorbed by its walls, it will contain a good approximation to blackbody radiation. The spectrum, and therefore color, of the light that comes out will be a function of the cavity temperature alone. A graph of the spectral radiation intensity plotted versus frequency(or wavelength) is called the blackbody curve. Different curves are obtained by varying the temperature.

When the body is black, the absorption is obvious: the amount of light absorbed is all the light that hits the surface. For a black body much bigger than the wavelength, the light energy absorbed at any wavelength λ per unit time is strictly proportional to the blackbody curve. This means that the blackbody curve is the amount of light energy emitted by a black body, which justifies the name. This is the condition for the applicability of Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation: the blackbody curve is characteristic of thermal light, which depends only on the temperature of the walls of the cavity, provided that the walls of the cavity are completely opaque and are not very reflective, and that the cavity is in thermodynamic equilibrium. When the black body is small, so that its size is comparable to the wavelength of light, the absorption is modified, because a small object is not an efficient absorber of light of long wavelength, but the principle of strict equality of emission and absorption is always upheld in a condition of thermodynamic equilibrium.

In the laboratory, blackbody radiation is approximated by the radiation from a small hole in a large cavity, a hohlraum, in an entirely opaque body that is only partly reflective, that is maintained at a constant temperature. (This technique leads to the alternative term cavity radiation.) Any light entering the hole would have to reflect off the walls of the cavity multiple times before it escaped, in which process it is nearly certain to be absorbed. Absorption occurs regardless of the wavelength of the radiation entering (as long as it is small compared to the hole). The hole, then, is a close approximation of a theoretical black body and, if the cavity is heated, the spectrum of the hole's radiation (that is, the amount of light emitted from the hole at each wavelength) will be continuous, and will depend only on the temperature and the fact that the walls are opaque and at least partly absorptive, but not on the particular material of which they are built nor on the material in the cavity (compare with emission spectrum).

The radiance or observed intensity is not a function of direction. Therefore, a black body is a perfect Lambertian radiator.

Real objects never behave as full-ideal black bodies, and instead the emitted radiation at a given frequency is a fraction of what the ideal emission would be. The emissivity of a material specifies how well a real body radiates energy as compared with a black body. This emissivity depends on factors such as temperature, emission angle, and wavelength. However, it is typical in engineering to assume that a surface's spectral emissivity and absorptivity do not depend on wavelength so that the emissivity is a constant. This is known as the gray body assumption.

With non-black surfaces, the deviations from ideal blackbody behavior are determined by both the surface structure, such as roughness or granularity, and the chemical composition. On a "per wavelength" basis, real objects in states of local thermodynamic equilibrium still follow Kirchhoff's Law: emissivity equals absorptivity, so that an object that does not absorb all incident light will also emit less radiation than an ideal black body; the incomplete absorption can be due to some of the incident light being transmitted through the body or to some of it being reflected at the surface of the body.

In astronomy, objects such as stars are frequently regarded as black bodies, though this is often a poor approximation. An almost perfect blackbody spectrum is exhibited by the cosmic microwave background radiation. Hawking radiation is the hypothetical blackbody radiation emitted by black holes, at a temperature that depends on the mass, charge, and spin of the hole. If this prediction is correct, black holes will very gradually shrink and evaporate over time as they lose mass by the emission of photons and other particles.

A black body radiates energy at all frequencies, but its intensity rapidly tends to zero at high frequencies (short wavelengths). For example, a black body at room temperature (300 K) with one square meter of surface area will emit a photon in the visible range (390–750 nm) at an average rate of one photon every 41 seconds, meaning that, for most practical purposes, such a black body does not emit in the visible range.

The study of the laws of black bodies and the failure of classical physics to describe them helped establish the foundations of quantum mechanics.