I was going to ask this last night, but the board was running so slow, I saved it for this morning.
I am a bit confused on this issue, photons being created as electrons jump orbit. I was reading a Sci-Fi book and they briefly mentioned this. If a photon is created when an electron jumps orbit, where does the photon come from? From the electron? If so can an electron run out?
(or do electrons gather photons, storing them?)
and uh… there is no such thing as a stupid question right?
As an electron jumps down a level in nuclei it gains more energy. This energy is partly released as a partile of energy i.e. a photon.
You can observe this effect in fluoresence, initally an eletron adsorbs energy (via say a photon that has the energy of UV light, remember particle = wave here) which excites the electron and it jumps up an energy level in the nucleus. The electron then loses a bit of energy from random collisions then returns to its origional energy level. The photon it emits is at a higher wavelength (Energy = planck constant X speed of light / wavelength). This leads to UV being turned into blue light under them fluoresence lights in nightclubs .
I thought it was more like this…the electron loses energy as it falls down to a lower quantum state (“orbital shell” of the atom) and that energy is released as a photon of a particular wavelength.
Oh yeah, been a while since quantum theory.
It drops down a shell where it cannot posses the amount of energy that it would have in a higher shell. It loses the energy by emitting a photn.
That sound better?
Nask
Incidentally, the idea of an accelerating charged particle giving off electromagnetic radiation existed before Quantum Mechanics.
Classical mechanics (as of James Clerk Maxwell, at least) described this phenomenon in terms of the acceleration causing a “kink” in the charged particle’s electric field, which would induce a kink in the local magnetic field, which would induce another kink in the electric field farther away, and the whole effect would propagate outward at the speed of light. It is by accelerating lots and lots of charged particles, in fact, that a radio transmitter works.
Think of the atom as a sort of battery. It stores energy by moving its electrons to higher orbits. It releases energy by moving electrons to lower orbits.
Under some conditions the energy is released spontaneously, all by itself, because the electrons tend to seek out lower energy states. But in other cases, the atom needs a kick in order to release its energy.
The energy can come in and go out in a lot of different ways, but light is perhaps the most common way to get energy in and out, especially in spontaneous emissions.
So yes, the atom can “run out” of photons, just by being “discharged” or having all of its electrons at their lowest energy states.
(Well, technically, an atom can still produce photons in a nuclear reaction, but that’s a destructive proccess, and then it’s not the same atom anymore.)