量子关键电子系统:未知的符号世界

Shortly after de Broglie published his ideas that the electron in a hydrogen atom could be better thought of as being a circular standing wave instead of a particle moving in quantized circular orbits, Erwin Schrödinger extended de Broglie’s work by deriving what is now known as the Schrödinger equation. When Schrödinger applied his equation to hydrogen-like atoms, he was able to reproduce Bohr’s expression for the energy and, thus, the Rydberg formula governing hydrogen spectra. Schrödinger...

It is said that the energy of an electron in an atom is quantized; that is, it can be equal only to certain specific values and can jump from one energy level to another but not transition smoothly or stay between these levels.

Werner Heisenberg considered the limits of how accurately one can measure properties of an electron or other microscopic particles. He determined that there is a fundamental limit to how accurately one can measure both a particle’s position and its momentum simultaneously. The more accurate the measurement of the momentum of a particle is known, the less accurate the position at that time is known and vice versa. This is what is now called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He mathematically...

An atom comprises protons and neutrons, which are contained inside the dense, central core called the nucleus, with electrons present around the nucleus. Taking into account the wave–particle duality of electrons and the uncertainty in position around the nucleus, quantum mechanics provides a more accurate model for the atomic structure. It describes atomic orbitals as the regions around the nucleus where electrons of discrete energy exist, characterized by four quantum numbers:  n, l, ml, and...

The arrangement of electrons in the orbitals of an atom is called its electron configuration. We describe an electron configuration with a symbol that contains three pieces of information:

Following the work of Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues in the early twentieth century, the picture of atoms consisting of tiny dense nuclei surrounded by lighter and even tinier electrons continually moving about the nucleus was well established. This picture was called the planetary model since it pictured the atom as a miniature “solar system” with the electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun. The simplest atom is hydrogen, consisting of a single proton as the nucleus...