Do electrons actually disappear and reappear on a different energy

>>8311896

They move much slower than light and can be detected just fine. The reason for the orbital model is that the movement of electrons is not linear, meaning that you can't predict their position the same way you can with a flying ball. That's why you use statistical models to say how high the probability is of them using a certain path.

>>8311896
Yep.

>>8311954
>movement not linear
so velocity is not constant? so they get accelerated and decelerated a bunch?

>>8312009
Not him but the electrons aren't balls the move around in circles. Taking that too far will get you into a pickle.

Read up on the history and development of quantum mechanics to see when shit rly started hitting the fan.

>>8311896
Not a physicist but as I understand it, electrons exist as a superposition of all possible locations located in a "shell" structure around the nucleus. Depending on the amount of energy they have is how you determine what shell they're in.

>>8311896
Sometimes when I talk to someone about it, it's described as more of an accounting system and trying to understand what is physically happening is useless.

>>8311896
shut up and calculate

>>8311896
"When the electron is close to the atom, opposite charges attract, and the electron is said to be stuck in a potential well. It is moving, so has positive (always) kinetic energy, but the Coulomb potential energy is negative and in a greater amount. The electron must slow down if it moves away from the atom, to maintain a constant total energy for the system. It reaches zero velocity (zero kinetic energy) at some finite distance away, although quantum mechanics allows a bit of cheating with an exponentially decreasing wavefunction beyond that distance.

The electron is confined to a small space, a spherical region around the nucleus. That being so, the wavelength of its wavefunction must in a sense "fit" into that space - exactly one, or two, or three, or n, nodes must fit radially and circumferentially. We use the familiar quantum number n,l,m. There are discrete energy levels and distinct wavefunctions for each quantum state.

Continued..

>>8311896
>>8313033

Note that the free positive-energy electron has all of space to roam about in, and therefore does not need to fit any particular number of wavelengths into anything, so has a continuous spectrum of energy levels and three real numbers (the wavevector) to describe its state.

When the atom absorbs a photon, the electron jumps from let's say for example from the 2s to a 3p orbital, the electron is not in any orbital during that time. Its wave function can be written as a time-varying mix of the normal orbitals. A long time before the absorption, which for an atom is a few femtoseconds or so, this mix is 100% of the 2s state, and a few femtoseconds or so after the absorption, it's 100% the 3p state. Between, during the absorption process, it's a mix of many orbitals with wildly changing coefficients. There was a paper in Physical Review A back around 1980 or 1981, iirc, that shows some plots and pictures and went into this in some detail. Maybe it was Reviews of Modern Physics. Anyway, keep in mind that this mixture is just a mathematical description. What we really have is a wavefunction changing from a steady 2s, to a wildly boinging-about wobblemess, settling to a steady 3p."

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46801/how-do-electrons-jump-orbitals

he says it better than i ever could


TL;DR The electron does not disapp

>>8311896
It's worse than that, not only does it teleport but it exists partially in different places at the same time.

File: iww1.jpg (297KB, 910x1200px) Image search: [Google]

297KB, 910x1200px

>>8313037
Did somebody say wobbly?

>>8312145
>>8312009
quantum physics sounds hugely interesting.. huh.
will do