excited state

… higher energy levels are called excited states. See also Franck-Hertz experiment.

All the various kinds of excitation that occur in the gas phase may also take place in the condensed states of matter (liquid, glass, or solid), but their relative contributions may be affected. In addition, special activated states are produced for which there…

…is the creation of transient excited states whose chemical and physical properties differ greatly from the original molecules. These new chemical species can fall apart, change to new structures, combine with each other or other molecules, or transfer electrons, hydrogen atoms, protons, or their electronic excitation energy to other molecules.…

In the simplest photochemical process, excited states can emit light in the form of fluorescence or phosphorescence. In 1565, while investigating a Mexican wood that relieved the excruciating pain of urinary stones, Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes made an aqueous (water-based) extract of the wood, which glowed blue when exposed to…

…lowest energy state) to an excited state (or higher energy state). This excited-state molecule often has drastically different properties from the ground-state molecule. In addition, a molecule’s excited state is short-lived because a sequence of events will either return it to its original ground state or form a new chemical…

Both singlet and triplet excited states are distinct in nature and have completely new properties, including bond length and conformation (molecular geometry or shape), among others. Because the electrons have a much smaller mass than the nuclei, absorption of light involves an almost instantaneous change in the electron configuration,…

…damaging chemical processes from the excited state. The simplest example is a molecule (such as a carotenoid) that has highly efficient internal conversion so that the other competing processes (fluorescence, intersystem crossing, and photochemistry) are negligible. The absorbed energy is simply dissipated as heat.

…raises the molecule into an excited state in which one of the chemical bonds no longer exists. Thus, absorption of light causes cleavage of a chemical bond and the release of two fragments called radicals because they each have enough electrons to form half of a chemical bond and are…

…the electron distribution in the excited state being quite different from that in the ground state; hence, the structure of the initially created excited singlet (by absorption of light) is most stable at 90°, or halfway between the cis and trans forms. The molecule attempts to adopt this conformation by…

…scintillator, leaving a trail of excited atomic or molecular species along its track. The particle may be incident on the detector from an external source, or it may be generated internally by the interaction of uncharged quanta such as gamma rays or neutrons. Typical excited states require only a few…

…have some suitable means of exciting molecules to higher energy states. The radiation emitted when the molecules decay back to the original energy states is then analyzed by means of a monochromator and a suitable detector. This system is used extensively for the observation of electronic spectra. The electrons are…

…is referred to as an excited state. Lying above the electron-containing MOs will be a series of MOs of increasing energy that are unoccupied. Electronic absorption transitions occur when an electron is promoted from a filled MO to one of the higher unfilled ones.

…state to one of its excited (high-energy) states. This strong excitation enables an equilibrium to be established between the two states, while at the same time other radiation—or sometimes the same radiation—takes atoms from the well-populated excited state to ionization. A slight change in the irradiating wavelength stops the equilibration…

…its ground state to an excited state, while the second photon completes the ionization process. For example, to achieve resonance ionization in the cesium atom that has an ionization potential of only 3.9 electron volts, this two-step process, shown in Figure 14A, works well with a single-colour laser at the…

…intervals in ground levels and excited levels of atoms can be made by placing a sample of atoms (usually a vapour in a glass cell) within the coil of an oscillator and tuning the device until a change is seen in the absorption of energy from the oscillator by the…

…solid, to a higher “excited state,” in which they can move through the solid. In the absence of the junction-forming layers, these “free” electrons are in random motion, and so there can be no oriented direct current. The addition of junction-forming layers, however, induces a built-in electric field that…