The nature of light has been a subject of inquiry since antiquity. In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton performed experiments with lenses and prisms ...

The electromagnetic spectrum consists of all the types of electromagnetic radiation arranged according to their frequency and wavelength. Each of the ...

Interference is a characteristic phenomenon exhibited by waves. When two electromagnetic waves interact with their peaks and troughs coinciding, a ...

When light of a particular wavelength strikes a metal surface, electrons are emitted. This is called the photoelectric effect. The minimum frequency of ...

Following the work of Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues in the early twentieth century, the picture of atoms consisting of tiny dense nuclei surrounded ...

When solids, liquids, or condensed gases are heated sufficiently, they radiate some of the excess energy as light. Photons produced in this manner have a ...

In the macroscopic world, objects that are large enough to be seen by the naked eye follow the rules of classical physics. A billiard ball moving on a ...

Werner Heisenberg considered the limits of how accurately one can measure properties of an electron or other microscopic particles. He determined that ...

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 ...

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 ...

An atomic orbital represents the three-dimensional regions in an atom where an electron has the highest probability to reside. The radial distribution ...

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

In an atom, the negatively charged electrons are attracted to the positively charged nucleus. In a multielectron atom, electron-electron repulsions are ...

To determine the electron configuration for any particular atom, we can build the structures in the order of atomic numbers. Beginning with hydrogen, and ...

The alkali metal sodium (atomic number 11) has one more electron than the neon atom. This electron must go into the lowest-energy subshell available, the ...