Ionisation with microwaves

[pavelcherepan]

So I was chatting today with a colleague at work who is a it scared of radiation and scared of mobile phones since he'd read it somewhere that those can give you cancer. Obviously, I tried to explain him as well as I could that microwaves are not a type of ionising radiation and that the power output of mobile phone transmitter is not sufficient to produce damage through heating effects akin to what happens in a microwave oven.

 

Not sure whether that helped, but then I started thinking that I might not have been 100% correct. It's a tiny issue, but nit-picking is my thing

 

Anyway. Normally microwaves can't ionise atoms, the energy of the photon is not sufficient, but would it be possible for them on occasion to induce ionisation via quantum tunneling? I have a very vague understanding of QT and so just wanted to check whether my thinking is correct or not.

 

Cheers!

Edited June 13, 2017 by pavelcherepan