Series

[JTieu_1L]

"For the Lyman series, the lower energy level is n=1; for the Balmer series, n=2; for the Paschen series, n=3; and for the Brackett series, n=4."

Can someone explain the concept of these series? Does it mean that for the Paschen series, the electron starts at the energy level n=3, then gets excited to higher energy levels? So is n=3, the electron's ground states?

[Sabina House 2A]

What those statements mean is that for each of the series, it involves electrons starting at a certain electron energy level and being excited to a higher level, or starting at various high energy levels and jumping back down to one standard energy level. For the Lyman series, which is in the ultraviolet region, all of the photons being emitted from electrons are at high energies (ultraviolet light has a high energy) due to the fact that they start at some energy level beyond n=1 and fall back to the level of n=1. Because jumps in energy levels get smaller as you move up in levels, any jump involving the n=1 level will have a higher energy associated with it than if it involved the n=2 or higher levels. So for the Lyman series, one emission line represents electrons falling from n=2 to n=1, another line would represent n=3 to n=1, another would represent n=4 to n=1, etc. For the Balmer series, all the emission lines involve less energy (visible light has less energy than UV light) because the electrons are falling from high energy levels to the n=2 level, which already has a smaller jump to n=3 than n=1 does to n=2. As the jumps between levels get smaller and smaller, the different series appear in lower and lower energy regions on the electromagnetic spectrum. So each series involves electrons starting at some standard level (ex: n=1 for Lyman series) and jumping to various higher energy levels, or vice versa (falling from higher levels to n=1). To answer your question if n=3 would be the ground state of an electron from the Paschen series, yes it would be. Sorry if this was confusing but hope it helps some!

[Keerthana Sundar 1K]

This concept kind of confuses me, since I was always taught higher numbers of n meant that the electron had more energy, and that the electrons closest to the nucleus (at level n = 1) had the lowest energy. Based off of that, how does a Lyman series, which occurs when UV light (higher energy) is emitted, have a lower energy level baseline (n = 1)? I might be remembering things wrong, since it's been 2 years since I last took chemistry, and we never touched upon quantum to this level.

A second question that may have been addressed, but I just wanted to confirm: do all hydrogen atoms, regardless of the isotope or charge, have the same spectral lines? If so, does this pattern continue for all elements that we know of?