User:Tyler Wynkoop/Tyler's Page/Balmer

Balmer Series Lab Summary

Background

The Balmer series is a set of spectral lines that characterizes hydrogen. When an element in gaseous form is heated, it emits light. More importantly, this light is not continuous throughout the spectrum, but rather several specific wavelengths, or spectral lines. These wavelengths are characteristic of the element that is heated. For hydrogen, these wavelengths are called the Balmer series. Hydrogen has four spectral lines in the visible spectrum: two shades of violet, light blue, and a vibrant red.

These emissions of light correspond to electrons dropping from excited states to ground states. When the electrons fall, they each release a photon corresponding the energy lost from transitioning states. Each spectral line indicates an electron from a specific excited state to the ground state, where the excited state is different for each spectral line.

Johann Balmer produced an equation in 1885 that determined the wavelength of an emitted photon as a function of the number of the excited state, where each excited state was assigned an integer in sequential order, and the ground state is n=2. Balmer's original equation was

[math]\displaystyle{ \lambda\ = B\left(\frac{m^2}{m^2 - n^2}\right) = B\left(\frac{m^2}{m^2 - 2^2}\right) }[/math]

where λ is the wavelength of the emitted photon, B is Balmer's contant, n=2 for the ground state, and "m" is an excited state. However, three years later, the physicist Johannes Rydberg developed, from Balmer's equation, a new equation that accounted for all transitions within hydrogen, including those from one excited state to another. Rydberg's equation is:

[math]\displaystyle{ \frac{1}{\lambda} = R_\mathrm{H}\left(\frac{1}{2^2} - \frac{1}{n^2}\right) \quad \mathrm{for~} n=3,4,5,... }[/math]

where R_H is the Rydberg constant. This formula can then be adapted to describe other atoms using element-specific constants. In this lab, our goal was to measure the Rydberg constant for Hydrogen.