A What is the true energy required to excite an atomic electron?

Maurice Morelock
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Is electronic excitation caused by a single wave or multiple waves in a given time period?
Energy is equal to Planck’s constant times the number of waves in 1 sec. The time scale for electronic excitation is far shorter then one second. So when we talk about the excitation of an electron from a lower level to a higher level occurring at a certain energy, are we talking about the exciting photon as a single wave with the amplitude equal to the number of waves in one sec?
 
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Maurice Morelock said:
Summary:: Is electronic excitation caused by a single wave or multiple waves in a given time period?

Energy is equal to Planck’s constant times the number of waves in 1 sec. The time scale for electronic excitation is far shorter then one second. So when we talk about the excitation of an electron from a lower level to a higher level occurring at a certain energy, are we talking about the exciting photon as a single wave with the amplitude equal to the number of waves in one sec?
A full description of the excitation of an atom by a photon requires an analysis using QFT and, in particular, the quantization of the EM field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_of_the_electromagnetic_field

The simplest description using only QM has a single photon of precisely the correct energy being absorbed by the atom and then a photon of the same energy being subsequently emitted. This is, however, not the whole story.
 
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
If we release an electron around a positively charged sphere, the initial state of electron is a linear combination of Hydrogen-like states. According to quantum mechanics, evolution of time would not change this initial state because the potential is time independent. However, classically we expect the electron to collide with the sphere. So, it seems that the quantum and classics predict different behaviours!
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