How long does it take an excited electron in an atom
to fall back to the ground state?
Is this, ie. the time it takes, deterministic or random?

On Oct 1, 11:10 am, "quentin" wrote:
How long does it take an excited electron in an atom
to fall back to the ground state?
Is this, ie. the time it takes, deterministic or random?

If I might boldly speculate....

Can you use the Uncertainty Principle?

Let's say you measure the line width of of an emission line and this
width represents the uncertainty in photon energy, delta-E. Using te
Uncertainty Principle you get that delta-E times delta-t = contant
where delta-t would be the uncertainty emission time.

Why second thought is "how long is the photon wave packet?" The
photon length / c might indicate a measure of the emission time.

Dwib