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According to the theory of the Dirac sea, developed by Paul Dirac in 1930, the vacuum of space is full of negative energy. This theory was developed to explain the anomaly of negative-energy quantum states predicted by the Dirac equation. A year later, after work by Weyl, the negative energy concept was abandoned and replaced by a theory of ...
The Dirac sea is a theoretical model of the electron vacuum as an infinite sea of electrons with negative energy, now called positrons. It was first postulated by the British physicist Paul Dirac in 1930 [1] to explain the anomalous negative-energy quantum states predicted by the relativistically-correct Dirac equation for electrons. [2]
If the potential energy is set to zero at infinite distance from the atomic nucleus or molecule, the usual convention, then bound electron states have negative potential energy. If an atom, ion, or molecule is at the lowest possible energy level, it and its electrons are said to be in the ground state.
To escape the atom, the energy of the electron must be increased above its binding energy to the atom. This occurs, for example, with the photoelectric effect, where an incident photon exceeding the atom's ionization energy is absorbed by the electron. [124]: 127–132 The orbital angular momentum of electrons is quantized. Because the electron ...
The energy of an electron is determined by its orbit around the atom, The n = 0 orbit, commonly referred to as the ground state, has the lowest energy of all states in the system. In atomic physics and chemistry , an atomic electron transition (also called an atomic transition, quantum jump, or quantum leap) is an electron changing from one ...
Dirac hole theory is a theory in quantum mechanics, named after English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, who introduced it in 1929. [1] The theory poses that the continuum of negative energy states, that are solutions to the Dirac equation, are filled with electrons, and the vacancies in this continuum (holes) are manifested as positrons with energy and momentum that are the negative of those ...
In quantum field theory, a Bogoliubov transformation on the creation and annihilation operators (turning an occupied negative-energy electron state into an unoccupied positive energy positron state and an unoccupied negative-energy electron state into an occupied positive energy positron state) allows us to bypass the Dirac sea formalism even ...
In physics, quantum tunnelling, barrier penetration, or simply tunnelling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which an object such as an electron or atom passes through a potential energy barrier that, according to classical mechanics, should not be passable due to the object not having sufficient energy to pass or surmount the barrier.