6. Under what condition, an electron can escape from atom?
Answers
- Electrons have a negative charge and are glued into atoms by the attractive force of its positively charged nucleus. In classical physics, an electron could not escape from an atom unless it received enough energy to overcome this force by ascending the nucleus's “potential barrier”
HOPE IT'S HELPS DUDE
Answer:
Yes, the process is called ionization and the amount of energy required is called ionization energy. It’s more or less the same as asking if you can get a ball outside of a well (well,energetically speaking it’s exactly the same although we should be careful since electrons in an atom are described by Quantum Mechanics).
Quantum Mechanically the idea is that an electron in an atom is in a bound state. A bound state is nothing but a state for which it’s energetically impossible to tear it apart at arbitrarily long distance.
Classically, you can think of a ball tied to a spring.
Until you break the string the ball is in a bound state because bringing it to an infinite distance would require an infinite amount of energy.
The mathematical condition implied by my words is that a state is not bound (free) if the Energy of that state is bigger than the value of the confining potential at infinite distance.
You can use the example of classical well (not an infinite one!) to make sense of this criterion.
Since the Coulomb potential which ties electrons to atoms goes to 0 at infinity any electron with energy>0 will be free, any electron with energy<0 will be bound.