I know this is a complicated one... a quantum physics question?

Question

Okay, so here goes:

I've been reading about Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, and the whole nature-of-the-atom thing. Really geeky-cool! But now I have this VERY specific question, one that hasn't been answered by searching through countless webpages.

The electrons going around the nucleus can only exist in certain orbits - and they don't actually travel from one orbit to the next. Instead, they disappear in one orbit, only to reappear in the one above or below.

Alrighty: where are they when they're in between? Since they're like waves, are they actually *cancelling one another out*, like the crest and trough of a wave do? That would make sense, but that conclusion is only an extrapolation from what I've read... and a long shot at best.

Maybe this one of those questions that nobody really knows the answer to, yet? I hope someone can satisfy my curiosity!

Thanks in advance,

-K

Answer 1

This was a nice question, for which I needed some time to figure out a good formulation of the answer. I hope this will help you:

The electron in a given state can be described by a wave function, which to a good approximation can be found by the Schrödinger equation. The wave functions of all electrons in an atom or a molecule overlap in space. However, if you take into account the amplitudes of the wave functions, some parts will have a positive and some a negative overlap. For any pairs of orbitals, the positive and negative overlap will cancel exactly, and the orbitals are said to be orthogonal.

If an electron absorbs a photon, it will gain energy and the wave function will change. That happens if, and only if, the new wave function also is orthogonal to all other wave functions. When this happens, the electron is said to enter an empty orbital. This transition does not involve any spatial movement, but the space occupied by the wave function may shrink or expand.

For this to happen, the photon much have exactly the right energy, and the interaction must happen at exactly the right time and place. This is necessary to produce a new wave function with the right energy, at the right place and with the right phase.

Such a perfect fit is impossible, but the transition can still happen because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. What is more, molecules are always perturbed by internal motions and external forces, which increases the chances for a transition. Transitions that are called forbidden can only happen during perturbations.

The importance of perturbations are seen in open space, where atoms may reach temperatures over a million K. Free atoms have no way to get rid of excess energy, because there are no perturbations. In dust clouds the atoms are in solid particles. In such particles the atoms experience enough perturbations to shed energy as photons, so dust clouds will cool down to far below freezing point.

Answer 2

The answer is that the electrons behave nothing like particles in orbits and they actually behave nothing like waves either. Either picture is the result of an analogy carried over from 19th century physics and they both have proven to be false.

Nature, instead, has chosen to do be completely different and quantum mechanics is the correct theory to describe how she really is. Unfortunately for us, there is no naive human analogy from the world of classical phenomena which could be successfully applied to wave functions.

So if you are confused, it is just a natural reaction of the human brain which likes to order new information in terms of old information. In case of QM, however, this attempt fails completely. The best thing to do in this case is to accept that one is dealing with a completely new kind of phenomenon and organize this knowledge accordingly. So now there are particles, waves AND wave functions and neither can be expressed in terms of the other.

I am not sure this helps but it is the definitive answer to your question.

As for reading about Bohr and Heisenberg, that is certainly interesting in terms of biographical material or to study the history of science, but it won't help with QM much. A modern QM textbook is the far better approach to understanding atoms. molecules and the structure of QM in general.

Answer 3

In the process of gaining energy to move into another shell, the electron's physical state changes into a superposition. It has the uniqueness of not being there and being there. This is partly due to Uncertainty Principle. The transition could be mapped on paper, but experimentally would vanish from sight. (If you could see that far down.) The other part the electron responds to is only matter can be in the shells. Anything else must be unreactive to the atom; for instance, waves. However, because the electron has a superposition, it never loses its properties of charge. I hope this helped a little.

Answer 4

Well....... They don't really 'orbit' in the sense that the planets orbit the Sun. They actually exist more as a probability distribution function (related to the de Broglie wave function) than as a discrete 'point'. And when a photon of the right energy comes by... Then they simply absorb it and assume the next allowed quantum state. Same when they emit a photon and drop to a lower energy state. The don't physically 'move' further away or closer to the nucleus (as most of the textbook images lead you to think).

Doug

Answer 5

A good question. Quantum tunnelling is one of the many weird ideas in quantum mechanics. It means you disappear in one location and reappear somewhere else, without actually being in any places en route. It's even possible that this takes place instantly, so you appear to travel at infinite speed. One development that this may mean is wireless transmission of power, so the power disappears at the generator and reappears at a distant resonant cavity, and if you're in between them, you don't absorb any power with possible harmful results, because no power passes through you. To me, an even weirder consequence of quantum mechanics is what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance", which means that you've got two distantly separated entangled particles; at some time in the past they once interacted. By performing a measurement on one particle, you instantly change the state of the other, even though it's light years away. The reason common sense isn't much use to a quantum physicist is that common sense developed in a world where quantum physics didn't play a part.

Answer 6

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