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Regarding the Fine Structure Constant in the spectral emission lines of a hydrogen atom, does the narrow gap/black line represent 1 out of 137 slices or possible steps of something? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by niktemadur@lemmy.world to c/askscience@lemmy.world

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In the color lines of a spectrograph and what seems to be an area with a certain color, zooming in shows that this color is delicately split in half by a black vertical hairline, on one side it's the emission of photons of color by a hydrogen atom with a spin up electron, on the other it seems to be the same color but it's a spin down electron.

Whenever I hear that gap mentioned, 1/137 is invoked, but I'm not sure precisely what that means, and I'm visualizing that the color of the spectral emission can be divided or deconstructed into a total of 137 vertical lines, and the one in the middle is black.

Maybe it represents 1/137 of a photon's wavelength at a certain color?

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[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's not precisely 1/137, so looking for 137 of something doesn't make sense.

[–] niktemadur@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah... I sort of suspected as much, I know the decimals continue like a number chorizo.

So flipping the question, then - does the black hairline gap in spectral emissions with up and down electrons represent some sort of irreducible step, and what would that be?

[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 3 points 2 months ago

I'm getting to the edge of what I know, but emission and absorbtion lines so represent a irreducible step: an electron moving from one energy state to another inside an atom. That irreducibility is where the "quantum" in quantum mechanics comes from. It's also how physicists figured how how electrons in an atom are grouped into shells and subshells.