What do electrons do when they get excited

These are called excited states of the atom. For example in the Bohr model, speed is inversely proportional to energy level. The ground state has the fastest speed. Show 3 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Add a comment. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile.

Linked 2. Related Hot Network Questions. Physics Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled. If an atom loses or gains electrons, it becomes ionized, or charged. The periodic table will give us the atomic number of an element. The atomic number tells us how many protons an atom has. For example, hydrogen has an atomic number of one - which means it has one proton, and thus one electron - and actually has no neutrons.

For the Student Based on the previous description of the atom, draw a model of the hydrogen atom. The "standard" model of an atom is known as the Bohr model. Different forms of the same chemical element that differ only by the number of neutrons in their nucleus are called isotopes. Most elements have more than one naturally occurring isotope. Many more isotopes have been produced in nuclear reactors and scientific laboratories.

Isotopes usually aren't very stable, and they tend to undergo radioactive decay until something that is more stable is formed. You may be familiar with the element uranium - it has several unstable isotopes, U being one of the most commonly known.

The means that this form of uranium has neutrons and protons combined. If we looked up uranium's atomic number, and substracted that from , we could calculate the number of neutrons that isotope has. Here's another example - carbon usually occurs in the form of C carbon , that is, 6 protons and 6 neutrons, though one isotope is C, with 6 protons and 7 neutrons.

For the Student Use the periodic table and the names of the elements given below to figure out how many protons, neutrons and electrons they have.

Draw a model of an atom of the following element: silicon, magnesium, sulphur, oxygen, and helium For the Student Using the text, define the following terms: energy levels, absorption, emission, excited state, ground state, ionization, atom, element, atomic mass, atomic number, isotope. A Optional Note on the Quantum Mechanical Nature of Atoms While the Bohr atom described above is a nice way to learn about the structure of atoms, it is not the most accurate way to model them.

Although each orbital does have a precise energy, the electron is now envisioned as being smeared out in an "electron cloud" surrounding the nucleus. It is common to speak of the mean distance to the cloud as the radius of the electron's orbit.

So just remember, we'll keep the words "orbit" and "orbital", though we are now using them to describe not a flat orbital plane, but a region where an electron has a probability of being. Electrons are kept near the nucleus by the electric attraction between the nucleus and the electrons. Kept there in the same way that the nine planets stay near the Sun instead of roaming the galaxy. Potassium glowed with a dim sort of violet light, and mercury with a horrible green light but no red or yellow.

When Kirchoff passed the emitted light through a prism it separated out into its various wavelengths the same way a rainbow effect is produced when white light is used , and he got a shock. He could only see a few thin lines of light in very specific places and often spread far apart. Clearly glowing sodium was not producing anywhere near all the different wavelengths of white light, in fact it was only producing a very characteristic band of light in the yellow region of the spectrum - just like a LED!

Kirchoff and Bunsen carefully measured the number and position of all the spectral lines they saw given off by a whole range of materials. These were called emission spectra , and when they had collected enough of them it was clear that each substance produced a very characteristic line spectrum that was unique.

No two substances produced exactly the same series of lines, and if two different materials were combined they collectively gave off all the lines produced by both substances. This, thought Kirchoff and Bunsen, would be a good way of identifying substances in mixtures or in materials that needed to be analyzed. So they did.

In they found a spectrum of lines that they had never seen before, and which did not correspond to any known substance, so, quite rightly, they deduced that they had found a new element, which they called cesium from the Latin word meaning "sky blue". Guess in what part of the spectrum they found the lines!

All the research on atomic structure and the hideously difficult-to-understand properties of electrons come together in the topic of "electron energy". An atom such as lithium has three electrons in various orbitals surrounding the atomic center. These electrons can be bombarded with energy and if they absorb enough of the quanta of energy being transferred they jump about and in the most extreme case, leave the lithium atom completely.

This is called ionization. Partly this difference in the amount of energy needed to dislodge different electrons away from the lithium atomic center is due to the fact that the center of the lithium atom is carrying the positive charges of three protons.

Moving a negatively charged electron away from a positively charged atomic center needs more and more energy as the amount of un-neutralized charge increases, thus;.

However, the amount of energy needed to remove the first electron is a good measure of what it takes to stimulate an electron to leave its atom, and how tightly it is held there in the first place. Within the atom, as Bohr pointed out, there are different possible positions for electrons to be found as defined by the principal quantum number , usually written as " n ". Bohr defined the energy of electrons located at these different locations of quantum state by the formula:. This is usually presented in the form of a diagram see left.

If the quantum is too small the electron could not reach the next level, so it doesn't try. If the quantum is too large the electrons would overshoot the next level, so again, it does not try. Only quanta of exactly the right size will be absorbed and used.