If squeezed, do orbiting electrons get closer to the nucleus?

Question

Is the distance static between the atomic nucleus and it's orbiting electrons ? If pressure is applied, will the electrons move closer the nucleus and woud this make the atom "smaller"?

Answer 1

No.

First of all, quantum mechanics requires that electron orbits are confined to specific quantized

distances from the nucleus. No matter how much pressure is applied, quantum mechanics

still rules.

The electrons in an atom start out filling the electron shells beginning at the lowest, most stable

energy configuration allowed. The Pauli exclusion principle forbids pushing more electrons into

a lower shell if that shell is already filled, no matter how much energy is pumped into the atom.

In fact, pumping more energy into the atom would tend to raise the orbit of an electron to a higher

more distant shell, rather than decrease it. But even then, the energy must be in a form that the

electron can absorb. It has to be in the form of a quantum of energy of just the right frequency for

the electron to absorb it, or the electron will not budge. So, applying pressure to an atom would

simply increase the kinetic energy of the electrons and raise them to higher orbits, if anything at

all.

Now there is such a thing as collapsed matter. This is an extreme case where gravity provides the

necessary extreme pressure in the form of a neutron star. But even here, the electrons are not

squeezed into lower orbits. The exclusion principle still prohibits the electrons from taking lower

orbits, so the atoms simply lose their electrons which become free, and the atom takes on the form

of a naked nucleus.

Answer 2

This would be better suited for the chemistry section. This is astronomy. However, the easiest way to explain it is that electrons don't "orbit" the nucleus. Don't think of electrons as points, think of them as being "fuzzy." They exist in orbitals based on mathematical probability. An S orbital looks like a sphere because the electron is probably somewhere on the surface of that sphere. If you want to get more in to it, the electron actually exists everywhere on orbital at once, kind of like a wave. Two electrons can occupy the same orbital provided that they have opposite spin. The different orbitals get their shapes from probability theory, and each is for the lowest energy state. You were right about the doughnut shaped orbital. d and f suborbitals are doughnut shaped. These shapes make more sense if you picture electrons like faces instead of particles. The shapes are based on the theory of three dimensional spherical harmonics. Imagine the teardrop shape of a p sub-orbital. Now imagine two people bouncing opposite each other on a trampoline. The surface of the trampoline would have a depression on one side where someone is standing, and would actually be slightly lifted up on the side where the person just jumped into the air. If you could slow it down and just look at the trampoline surface, you would see opposite teardrop shapes bent into the surface. If you could translate that to three dimensions you would get a shape that looks like a p sub-orbital.

Answer 3

You can't modify the orbits by applying pressure. Anyway, orbits do not exist in the same sense as planet trajectories. The position of an electron in a given 'orbital' is described by a probability distribution. You can't say where it is at every instant, only give probabilities.

These orbitals are quantized and there can be at most two electrons on a given one. This results in the impossibility of piling up electrons ever more tightly and is the reason for the resistance of bulk matter to pressure.

It is only under very extreme conditions (in the core of supernovae being transformed into neutron stars) that the electrons will be absorbed by the protons of the nuclei, which will be transformed into neutrons by the emission of escaping neutrinos. The resulting matter, made only of neutrons, is something very far away of anything we can imagine or produce on earth.

Answer 4

No, it's impossible for the atom to get smaller. The electrons are in perfectly balanced shells around the nucleus, and they cannot be pushed in a different direction, it would throw off the overall balance of the atom and it would become unstable.