What causes an electron to return to its ground state?

Wheelwalker
Messages
42
Reaction score
1
I've recently realized I have completely taken for granted that electrons simply tend to be found in their ground state. I want to understand fundamentally what is causing the electron to drop back to its ground state. It feels a force from the positively charged nucleus, but if it was given exactly enough energy to hop up into an excited state, how does it lose that energy and consequently get forced back "down"?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Its the process of spontaneous emission which requires QED to explain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_emission
'In quantum electrodynamics (or QED), the electromagnetic field has a ground state, the QED vacuum, which can mix with the excited stationary states of the atom (for more information, see Ref. [2]). As a result of this interaction, the "stationary state" of the atom is no longer a true eigenstate of the combined system of the atom plus electromagnetic field. In particular, the electron transition from the excited state to the electronic ground state mixes with the transition of the electromagnetic field from the ground state to an excited state, a field state with one photon in it. Spontaneous emission in free space depends upon vacuum fluctuations to get started.'

Thanks
Bill
 
Thanks Bill. Looks like this will have to wait for grad school!
 
Bill, since you're so helpful, in a kind of related question.

I'm reading about all of those transitions, lymann, balmer, paschen, and more.
Everytime I look it up it always begins with: "in the hydrogen emmison spectrum..."

Are these names only for hydrogen? What about the other elements? Do they have different names?
 
This is more physical chemistry stuff - I am more of the mathematical physics bent.

But all the above are for Hydrogen atoms and are the only ones I know of - and even then I had to look up paschen. They certainly exist, but its not something I am into.

Sorry mate - must leave it up to someone else.

Thanks
Bill
 
Only the H-atom can be fully solved in QM, since it's a 2-particle system. For the other atoms, you can't fully solve the spectral problem of the Hamiltonian, hence you can't determine the emission spectrum theoretically => the name of the transitions are only for the H-atom.
 
  • Like
Likes 1 person
I read Hanbury Brown and Twiss's experiment is using one beam but split into two to test their correlation. It said the traditional correlation test were using two beams........ This confused me, sorry. All the correlation tests I learnt such as Stern-Gerlash are using one beam? (Sorry if I am wrong) I was also told traditional interferometers are concerning about amplitude but Hanbury Brown and Twiss were concerning about intensity? Isn't the square of amplitude is the intensity? Please...
I am not sure if this belongs in the biology section, but it appears more of a quantum physics question. Mike Wiest, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Wellesley College in the US. In 2024 he published the results of an experiment on anaesthesia which purported to point to a role of quantum processes in consciousness; here is a popular exposition: https://neurosciencenews.com/quantum-process-consciousness-27624/ As my expertise in neuroscience doesn't reach up to an ant's ear...
Insights auto threads is broken atm, so I'm manually creating these for new Insight articles. Towards the end of the first lecture for the Qiskit Global Summer School 2025, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Olivia Lanes (Global Lead, Content and Education IBM) stated... Source: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/quantum-entanglement-is-a-kinematic-fact-not-a-dynamical-effect/ by @RUTA
Back
Top