MEDIUM
12th CBSE
IMPORTANT
Earn 100

The total energy of an electron in the first excited state of the hydrogen atom is about -3.4 eV.

(a)What is the kinetic energy of the electron in this state?

(b) What is the potential energy of the electron in this state?

(c) Which of the answers above would change if the choice of the zero of potential energy is changed?

Important Points to Remember in Chapter -1 - Atoms from NCERT PHYSICS PART 2 TEXTBOOK FOR CLASS 12 Solutions

1. Thomson's model:

(i) Atom, as a whole, is electrically neutral and therefore contains equal amount of positive and negative charges.

(ii) In Thomson’s model, an atom is a spherical cloud of positive charges with electrons embedded in it.

2. Rutherford’s atomic model:

(i) In Rutherford’s model, most of the mass of the atom and all its positive charge are concentrated in a tiny nucleus (typically one by ten thousand the size of an atom), and the electrons revolve around it.

(ii) Rutherford's model predicts that atoms are unstable because the accelerated electrons revolving around the nucleus must spiral into the nucleus. This contradicts the stability of matter.

(iii) It cannot explain the characteristic line spectra of atoms of different elements.

3. Spectral series:

The atomic hydrogen emits a line spectrum consisting of various series. The frequency of any line in a series can be expressed as
Lyman series: f= Rc112-1n2; n=2,3,4,
Balmer series: f= Rc122-1n2; n=3,4,5,
Paschen series: f= Rc132-1n2; n=4,5,6,
Brackett series: f= Rc142-1n2; n=5,6,7,
Pfund series: f= Rc152-1n2; n=6,7,8,

4. Bohr's atomic model:

(i) Niels Bohr proposed a model for hydrogenic (single electron) atoms. He introduced three postulates and laid the foundations of quantum mechanics.

(ii) When an electron transits from higher energy level to lower energy level a photon is emitted having energy equal to the energy difference between the initial and final states. The frequency of the emitted photon is then given by: hv= Ei-Ef 

(iii) An atom absorbs radiation of the same frequency the atom emits, in which case the electron is transferred to an orbit with a higher value of n.Ei+hv= Ef

(iv) For the electron revolving in a stationary orbit is L= nh/2π where n is an integer called a quantum number.

(v) In a hydrogen atom, an electron revolves in certain stable orbits (called stationary orbits) without the emission of radiant energy.

(vi) For a hydrogen atom radius of nth energy level, rn= n2mh2π24πε0e2

(vii) Energy of the electron in nth energy level En= -me48n2ε02h2= -13.61n2 eV

(viii) Bohr’s model is applicable only to hydrogenic (single electron) atoms.

5. de Broglie's explanation of bohr's second postulate of quantisation:

de Broglie’s hypothesis that electrons have a wavelength λ= h/mv gave an explanation for Bohr’s quantised orbits by bringing in the wave particle duality. The orbits correspond to circular standing waves in which the circumference of the orbit equals a whole number of wavelengths.