Failure of Rutherford's Nuclear Model

In 1913, Niels Bohr reported on his efforts to devise a

model of the process of light emission from the atoms
of elements that would explain the very particular
frequencies emitted. The problem proved to be far
harder than one would expect. Then, the best model of
an atom was Rutherford's nuclear model.
According to it, an atom is like a little solar system. It
has a massive, but tiny, positively charged nucleus.
That nucleus exerts an attractive force on lighter
negatively charged electrons that orbit it, rather like the
way the planets orbit the very massive sun.

In the Rutherford model, exciting a gas by passing high voltage electricity through it would energize the electrons,
which could then move farther away from the attractive pull of the nucleus. When they fell back towards the
nucleus, the energy they gained would be lost as light energy; that emitted light forms the emission spectrum.

The first difficulty was that, as they fell back to the nucleus, they would pass through a continuous range of
orbital frequencies and thus emit a continuous range of frequencies of light. There was no way to limit the emitted
light to just a few special frequencies.

The second difficulty was more serious. Nothing stops the emission of energy by the electrons through this
process of light emission. They would continue to do it until they crashed into the nucleus. According to classical
electrodynamics, this would happen very quickly. It was not clear that Rutherford's model allowed matter made of
atoms to exist at all.

Bohr's Theory
Bohr solved both problems with a proposal of breath-ta
electrodynamics was quite clear: an electron orbiting the nuc
therefore must radiate energy. It would be like a little radio
electromagnetic waves. In the process, it must lose energy, fall
pull of the nucleus and eventually crash

Bohr simply posited that this was not true. Rather, he assert
orbits arrayed around the nucleus in which an electron could
losing any energy.
Next, Bohr supposed that electrons can jump up and down between these allowed orbits. If
an electron is to jump up, away from the nucleus to a higher energy orbit, it needs to gain
energy. That enables it overcome the pull of the atom's positively charged nucleus and climb
away from it. The electron gets that extra energy from light falling on the atom. The energy of
the light is transferred to the electron, which can then jump up to a higher energy orbit. The
incident light must deliver exactly the right amount of energy to make up the difference between
the energy of the orbit left behind and the one to which the electron jumps.

In addition Bohr assumed that the amount of energy drawn from the exciting light conforms with
Planck's formula: the energy is just h times its frequency.
The outcome is that light only of a very specific frequency can excite the jumps between two
specific orbits. For some specified jump, the frequency of the light has to be tuned
precisely so that h times the frequency exactly matches the energy needed to complete the
jump.

Bohr's theory also allows for the reverse process. Once an electron h
energy orbit, it will not stay there. It will jump back down to a lo
process, it will re-emit the energy it gained in jumping up in the f
frequency. Once again, the energy of the light emitted will conform to
equal to h times it

As a result, when an electron jumps down between two orbits, it

frequency that is characteristic of exactly that jump.
 Eventually, these quantities of light energy that the
atom absorbs and emits came to be identified with
Einstein's light quanta. In 1913, however, Bohr was
cautious. He did not say that a light quantum is emitted.
He simply spoke of

"the emission of a homogeneous radiation, for which

the relation between the frequency and the amount of
energy emitted is the one given by Planck's theory."

This avoidance of Einstein's quantum was no accident.

Bohr was a fierce opponent of Einstein's notion
and only relented in his opposition when new
developments in the 1920s compelled the acceptance
of Einstein's notion.

Having made those assumptions, Bohr could read off

the oddest result from the observed atomic spectra.
Since only very few frequencies of light were present, it
followed that only very few jumps were possible, so that
only very few orbits were permitted  for the
electron. It was as though our sun allowed a planet to
orbit where Venus is and where the Earth is; but it
prohibited any planet in between.

All that remained was to figure out just which of the

many possible orbits are found in this favored set of
stable orbits. That was relatively easy to do. The
observed spectra gave a complete catalog of the
energy differences between these allowed, stable
orbits. Each line in the observed spectra resulted from
electrons jumping between two specific orbits. It is a
numerical exercise to determine precisely which those
few orbits are. The calculation was not so different from
this exercise in geography. If we are given the
distances between every pair of cities in a country, we
can use those data to figure out where on the map
each city is found. Atomic spectra gave Bohr the
energetic distances between his allowed orbits. From
those data he could determine the energies and thus
locations of those allowed orbits.
 When Bohr did that, he found a very simple way to summarize just which
of the orbits were allowed. They were those whose orbital angular We have seen that the ordinary (linear) momentum of a bo
momentum came in units h/2π. Just as Planck's relation told us that Angular momentum is an analogous quantity that plays an
rotating or orbiting systems. For a small mass like a classic
radiant energy comes in whole units of h x frequency, Bohr now found defined as the electron's mass x radius of orbit x angular s
that orbiting electrons always must have whole units of angular
momentum: one h/2π, two h/2π, three h/2π and nothing in between.

Angular momentum
= one h/2π, two h/2π, three h/2π, . . .
Bohr's theory was puzzling, even maddening. Just as
with Einstein's hypothesis of the light quantum, it
seemed to require that classical physical notions both
hold and fail at the same time. That was not a
comfortable situation. Those discomforts were eclipsed
by a brighter fact. Bohr's theory worked, and it worked
very well. Observational spectroscopy was providing
theorists with an expansive catalog of spectra of many
substances under many different conditions. Starting
from Bohr's theory, physicists were able to develop an
increasingly rich and successful account of them. While
it was clear that something was not right, in the face of
these successes, it was tempting to postpone asking
too pointedly how this goose could keep laying golden
eggs.
The central result of Bohr's theory of 1913 was that
the angular momentum of orbiting electrons came in
full multiples -- quanta -- of h/2π. In the years
immediately following, that simple condition was This sidebar should contain a brief sentence that gives you a useful idea
of the physical quantity "action." Alas, I've been unable to figure out what
expanded into a broader condition that a quantity that sentence might be. It probably doesn't help too much if I tell you that
known as "action" came only in whole multiples for the trajectories of bodies obeying classical physical laws can be picked
out as those that render extremal the action added up along the
physical systems that returned periodically to the trajectories. Did that help? I didn't think it would.
same initial condition. As a result the term
"quantum of action" entered the physicists'
vocabulary.

de Broglie and Schroedinger's Matter Waves

          

Matter Waves
 Bohr's theory of 1913 and its later elaboration gave a
wonderfully rich repertoire of methods for accounting
for atomic spectra. They depended on a contradictory
mix of classical and non-classical notions. By the early
1920s, the limits of this system began to show and
theorists also turned to the task of making some
coherent sense of this body of theory that soon came to
known as "the old quantum theory."

The major breakthroughs to the "new

quantum theory" came in the middle of the 1920s. A
number of different theorists found ways of developing
coherent theories of the quantum domain; and they all
eventually proved to be different versions of the same
new theory. Heisenberg, Born and Jordan first
developed matrix mechanics. Its basic quantities were
infinite tables of numbers -- matrices -- drawn as
directly as possible from observed quantities like atomic
spectra.

Another approach proved equivalent and is easier to

picture. It was based on a supposition by de
Broglie of 1923 and developed by Schroedinger in
1926. Einstein had shown that a wave phenomenon,
light, also had particle like properties. Might the reverse
be true also? Might particle like electrons also have
wave properties?

The hypothesis answered yes. It associated a wave of

a particular wavelength with a particle of some definite
momentum.
 Here is de Broglie's formula that tells us which
wavelength goes with which momentum:

momentum = h / wavelength
Notice how similar it is to Planck's formula which relates
energy and frequency. Here is Planck's formula again:

energy = h x frequency
The two together form the foundation of the matter
wave approach. They tell us how to assign a wave of
some definite frequency and wavelength to a particle of
some given energy and momentum.
Here's a way to see the two equations in even more similar form. For a
periodic process we can write frequency = 1/period, where "period" is
the time needed for the process to recur. Then Planck's formula
becomes
energy = h / period.
Now the equations relate momentum to a length (the wavelength) and
energy to a time (the period).