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Do the atomic emission spectra provide supporting evidence for the wave or particle nature of electrons?

Physics Asked by Hypatia of Alexandria on June 7, 2021

My textbook states that the observation that a electric current passing through a gas causes characteristic emission spectrum to be observed gives supporting evidence for the wave nature of electrons.

I don’t really understand why emission atomic spectra suggest the wave nature of electrons. Doesn’t emission spectra give supporting evidence to Bohr’s model of the atom, with orbiting electrons having quantised energies?

P.S I’m not sure which tags this question should go under.

One Answer

Bohr's model is wrong. A less-wrong model, which explains more of the data, is the Schroedinger wave equation, in which the electron is a wave.

However, a historian would point out that Bohr's hand-waving justification for quantized orbits was that an electron in a circular orbit with momentum $p$ would have de Broglie wavelength $lambda = h/p$, and that an integer number of such waves must "fit" into the circular orbit. The Bohr model is a wave model.

Answered by rob on June 7, 2021

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