Physicists Engineer the Picture-Perfect Classical Atom
Monday, April 13, 2009 - 16:35
in Physics & Chemistry
Picture the textbook atom. It would resemble a miniature solar system -- an atomic nucleus orbited by electrons, drawn in nice tidy elliptical orbits -- like planets orbiting the Sun. This is a reasonable classical depiction of an atom, but it is completely at odds with the usual quantum description of an atom. Now, a University of Virginia physicist has engineered, in a sense, the classical picture-perfect textbook atom.