Experiment 1 - Flame Test of Metal Cations

• sir Isaac Newton showed that sunlight is a mixture of different kinds of light
• when a ray of light is passed through a prism, it separated into a rainbow of colors called continuous spectrum
• since each color corresponds to a given wavelength, this indicated that sunlight consists of light of all wavelengths
• lights of very short (ultraviolet) and very long (infrared) wavelengths are invisible to the human eye but can be detected and recorded by instruments
• each wavelength corresponds to a particular amount of energy
• heating an element to a high temperature raises some of its atoms to high-energy states
• when a compound is heated enough to decompose it, electrons in the metal atoms are raised to high-energy states
• electron in ground state to excited state - heat in
• electron in excited state to ground state - light out
• electrons in high-energy state - excited state
• electrons with low energy - ground state
• atoms in excited state may have one or more of its electrons at a greater average distance from the nucleus than in the ground state
• atoms in higher-energy levels or in excited state are unstable
• short wavelength - ultraviolet
• long wavelength - infrared
• lights of two different wavelengths or color correspond to two different energies