Question

If light is a electromagnetic wave, will it get deflected near a magnet ?

Answer 1

A magnet can bend the path of any moving charged particle. In fact, that’s how your TV screen displays a video picture. A magnet deflects a beam of electrons to create a video pattern on the screen. Light, however, has no charge and therefore its path is unaffected by a magnet. But, a magnetic field, which includes changing fields. If it’s a changing field, things get more complicated. Any changing magnetic field generates a changing electric field and that produces an electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic (EM) waves cannot interact directly with light photons since photons have no charge. EM waves do not bend light, at least enough that we can measure. If radio waves, for example, bent light appreciably then a transmitting radio station would look blurry. But stations don’t go blurry. Actually, electromagnetic waves can bend light through an indirect, quantum effect—but to such a tiny degree that we cannot measure it. This quantum effect (called Delbrück scattering) "is a process where, for a short time, the photon disintegrates into an electron and positron pair," says Norbert Dragon, physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Hanover, Germany. The charged pair interacts with an EM wave and then recombines into the photon with a changed direction. Thus, the EM wave bends the light. "More probably the charged pair will annihilate into two or more photons—this process has been observed under extreme conditions—but, then, the light ray is not bent but rather split into several rays,"