I will try my best to explain this question because I’ve googled multiple times over a decade and have asked a physics PhD and neither could understand what I meant, nor answered the question.
I understand that Photons are wave-particles. The smaller the wavelength, the more frequency. I also know that electromagnetism are 2 of the “same thing”, using the same force particle, a photon.
So what frequency do photons that are a acting as strictly magnetic? Magnetism seems to penetrate a heck of a lot more things than even gamma rays (excluding some metals), so why’s that? What makes them different, if they’re the same particle? Are magnetism photons “straight” or act more as a particle than a wave? Do magnetic photons experience the Doppler Effect? If we can count light photons with special instruments, can we do the same with magnet photons? What causes magnetic photons to “bend” around a magnetic object? Like if there was an MRI machine, does that mean there are just a LOT more magnetic photons or is the amplitude of them greater? Can magnetic photons turn into light photons directly?
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Photons are “wave-particles”, but so is everything else (at least, all fundamental particles).
All particles also sometimes have wave-like properties. The bigger the wavelength (smaller the frequency) something has the more wave-like it is, and the smaller the wavelength the more particle-like it is. This is why high-frequency/low-wavelength photons (gamma particles) act notably particle-like, while low-frequency/high-wavelength photons (radio waves) act very wave-like.
There is a thing called a de Broglie wavelength (named after Louis de Broglie, pronounced more like “broy”, boy with an r), which is inversely proportional to something’s momentum. The more momentum it has the smaller a wavelength, the more particle-like. You, a person, with an awful lot of mass (compared with an electron, say), have a really small wavelength, so act very much like a particle. Photons, electrons, neutrons, atoms, even decently-sized molecules have all been observed to have wave-like behaviour in the right circumstances.
None of which really matters here, but anyway…
Magnetism is complicated. One way of thinking about it is as the correction we have to make to electric forces to account for things moving. We get magnetic fields when we have accelerating charges, or changing electric fields. But by shifting perspective an effect due to an electric field can become an effect due to a magnetic field; they are different ways of looking at the same thing. Which means your question:
> So what frequency do photons that are a acting as strictly magnetic?
isn’t quite right. We cannot get a photon that is strictly dealing with magnetism, because if *we* shift perspective (where the photon will look exactly the same) it might become an electric photon. They are the same thing. The answer to what frequency it has is that it depends on the energy being transferred. The frequency of a photon is directly proportional to its energy; more energy, higher frequency (more particle-like). Low-energy photons carrying a(n electro-)magnetic interaction will be very wave-like. Magnets tend not to transfer that much energy, so they tend to be fairly wave-like.
> What causes magnetic photons to “bend” around a magnetic object?
They don’t. Magnetic *fields* bend around magnetic objects, but fields are mathematical tools physicists use to help model and understand phenomena. I would say that the fields themselves aren’t real, except when we get into quantum mechanics the line between “just a mathematical tool” and “physical reality” become a bit more blurry that we might like.
The other thing we need to talk about is **virtual particles**. When we think of magnets interacting via photons, we’re usually talking about virtual photons rather than “real” photons.
Virtual particles are like real particles, but they are only temporary, cannot exist on their own, and only exist in an awkward quantum-mechanically-uncertain way. They are used to make the maths of quantum field theory work, but cannot be observed or detected on their own. So… aren’t really real, just being mathematical tools. Except, again, that disclaimer about “just a mathematical tool” when it comes to quantum mechanics.
So those “magnetic photons” are photons, but probably also virtual photons. Which are complicated. But the maths works… honest!
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