I've been looking for the way an ultraviolet photon transfers energy to an electron. I know that high energy photons (Xray) collide with an electron in a collision producing a longer wavelength photon (less energetic)and the electron is scattered off at an angle (Compton Effect). This collision is viewed as the photon being a particle with discreet momentum and energy. The Compton scattering does not occur for lower energy photons such as UV.
Even lower energy photons such as microwaves and radio waves transfer energy into and out of an antenna and creat electron flows, but the energy transfer is not normally talked about in a quantum effect way.
As I understand, the UV photon energy is absorbed by an electron (somehow)causing the electron to gain just enough energy to jump to a higher energy orbital and not be ejected completley out of the atom. If this energy is not of the right wavelength nothing happens. If the wavelenght is right (?) the electron will gain energy, jump, and eventually lose this energy and emit a photon of lower wavelength (fluoresce) with some energy lost as heat. I know that the photon is can be viewed as either a particle or an electromagnetic wave. Is this energy transfer a particle collision or is it an impedance or resonanance effect due to wavelength matching of the photon wave and electron wave??
In the above substitute "I Believe" for "I know"
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