More idle thoughts

[lionkingcmsl]

Given that absolute zero is the temperature where all molecular vibrational motion stops, but not all molecular motion stops, is there a theoretical temperature where atomic motion stops. That is a point where the electrons stop orbiting the nucleus.

If there is such a point, what happens then? Do the electrons just hover in place? Do they fall "into" the nucleus?

If they just hover in place, what happens when you warm the atom back above that point? Can they start orbiting again, in defiance of the law of angular momentum?

Just more esoteric musing from the lion. :=3

Comments

[picadelphon.livejournal.com]

Absolute Zero, it more of a slow down, it the atom it never sttops, if it does things fall apart with the change of the atom..

But with string string theory, there is a lot of different affects that atoms interact with that act in a very strange way, not like normal physics they act like there in charge, (AKA Strange Matter) string theory and particle physics have there own way of affecting matter, like stuff falling apart.. but it is the Spring FORCE that keeps it all going, a little Bounce that keep it all runing like clock work..

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

We have reached a few billionth of a degree above absolute zero. There we see Bose Einstein Condensate, the temperature at which all the electrons move so slowly that all the electrons in the material sync up and are moving as one. They have fired light into such a thing and found it to slow down to the speed a man walks.

Making it colder would just slow the electrons further, making the speed of light in said material also slow down. My thinking is it's a lot like a reciprical of Xeno; you cut the speed in half as you get colder and colder, but the speed never reaches zero. So Absolute Zero can never be reached, only approached.

Electrons DO sometimes fall into the nucleus. It's called Electron capture and occurs when the isotope has too few neutrons. It emits a Neutrino as I recall.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

The "Bohr model" of neat little electron balls orbiting a spherical nucleus is easy to visualize. Compared to the reality, though, it is rather Bohring.

The electron is a smeared out set of probabilities around the nucleus (itself fuzzy) ... and indeed, inner electrons can "fall into" the nucleus if it has a lot of protons. This generally changes a proton into a neutron, but it must spit out neutrinos/photons and such until the energy balances out again. Some radioactive decay is driven by this phenomenon.

In absolute zero, perhaps all of the electrons would be captured and the remaining nuclei, after ejecting leftovers, collapse together. What's left would be an undifferentiated mass of neutrons, effectively a neutron star if there's enough material, and on to a black hole when there is even more.

Neutron stars are not caused by absolute zero phenomena, though, as space is still about 2.7°K. Even inside of a nebula that "shades" the interior from the background radiation, it wouldn't be cold enough for this we think. Some radiation escapes that suggests a minimum of around 1°K or so, but I'm not current on this.

Re-warming the neutrons (assuming that the black-hole state wasn't reached) would not automatically split them into component parts again, though radiation/particles impinging upon them can cause such splits. (This is another major radioactive mechanism, and indeed it's sort of the reverse of the capture.)

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle