Light As Both A Particle And Wave And How It Relates To Atom

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With the understanding of DeBroglie Duality of Light, an energy of light is related to a frequency and wavelength of that light. More importantly, light/energy can act like a particle (Planck) so that energy coming at the atom is actually not one continuous entity but a group of discrete packages (how much energy in the package is determined by its frequency).

Why is this important?

Remember when we talked about Bohr's model of atom, the atom only absorbs a specific amount of energy (Planck would say a specific discrete energy package size) actually equal to the distance the electron would need to jump to the higher energy level (atom is now in excited state). Of course, then the electron falls back down to the lower energy level (atom back in the ground state) while emitting that specific energy package size (we "see" as frequency/wavelength). If it is in a small section of the Electromagnetic spectrum, we humans call it color.

FYI, since each atoms have a specific amount of electrons, all atoms of the same element absorbs and then emitted the same energy packages (so we would see same energy traveling out of that specific type of atom. Sometime it is in the wavelength of light to see a color. Note: this is not the reason your shirt is blue because that is reflective energy so that if there is no light, the shirt is black. A neon sign is an example of what we mean here since the sign is emitting its own light/color thereby if everything is dark, you still see the sign.

To see how to calculate problems going from energy to color (a specific wavelength in nm), click, [Energy to Color Example showing Work]



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Last edited October 19, 2014 11:26 am (diff)
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