The case of the Doppler effect for photons revisited

Abstract

A detailed account is presented of the Doppler effect as a photon phenomenon, complementing a recent paper by Giuliani (2013 Eur. J. Phys. 34 1035-47). The essence of Schrödinger's pioneering derivation (1922 Phys. Z. 23 301-3) of a Doppler formula in terms of the corpuscular theory of light, using energy-momentum conservation, is related. Some neglected references that put the whole scene around the Ives-Stilwell experiment into a more precise perspective are highlighted. Atoms as clocks and particle-wave complementarity are also discussed briefly. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd.