History
In 1900, Max Planck derived the formula for the energy of a single energy radiator, e.g., a vibrating atomic unit:
where is Planck's constant, is the frequency, k is Boltzmann's constant, and T is the absolute temperature.
Then in 1913, using this formula as a basis, Albert Einstein and Otto Stern published a paper of great significance in which they suggested for the first time the existence of a residual energy that all oscillators have at absolute zero. They called this residual energy Nullpunktsenergie (German), later translated as zero-point energy. They carried out an analysis of the specific heat of hydrogen gas at low temperature, and concluded that the data are best represented if the vibrational energy is
According to this expression, an atomic system at absolute zero retains an energy of ½hν.
Read more about this topic: Zero-point Energy
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