Radiationless de-excitation - how does radiative heating work?

[questing4truth]

You typically hear of radiative heating as exciting an electron to a higher state in an atom or molecule, but heat energy is the excessive vibration of a molecule. How do you reconcile these two models? I've heard of something called radiationless de-excitation whereby the electron passes its energy to the molecule and becomes de-excited. Is this the correct way to think about standard radiative heating?

 

[Andy Resnick]

If I understand you correctly, you are asking about photon-phonon coupling as a description of optical absorption and heating. I'm not an expert on this, but many solid-state and radiation heat transfer books give an account.