Explain The Evidence To Support The Structure Of The Atom

What is the evidence to support the structure of the atom?

The commonly accepted picture of the atom that we use today was not theorised all at once, rather it was continually built upon by a number of physicists throughout the years. A recent, previously accepted model of the atom was devised by JJ Thompson. He theorised that the atom consisted of a number of negatively charged electrons embedded within a sea of positive charge which could all move around freely, thusly named, the “Plum Pudding Model”; owing to its aesthetic similarity to the dessert. (Figure 1)

It wasn’t until Ernest Rutherford’s gold foil experiment that a better understanding of atomic structure was gained. In this experiment Rutherford fired positively charged alpha

We call this today the “Bohr model” of the atom (Figure 4). In this model (based on a hydrogen atom) he theorised that electrons travelled in circular orbits at certain energy levels. These electrons could pick up energy and move to a higher energy level, a process we call excitation. The electrons would then release this energy in the form of a photon, and drop back down to a stable level. This model however breaks apart when we examine other elements with more electrons, as it does nothing to explain interaction between numerous negatively electromagnetically charged electrons and why they do not simply excite each

de Broglie discovered that electrons, when forced to interact with matter, either through some physical process, or hitting a detector, did indeed present themselves as particles. But when the electrons were allowed to move on their own, either by being shot through a crystal or allowed to “wander” through a vacuum, they presented themselves as waves. This would mean that the electron could not simply exist in a 2-dimensional orbit around the nucleus, as the foundation of this theory was built upon the assumption that the electron remains a particle throughout the orbit, and doesn’t break down into a wave function half way through. Erwin Schrodinger then contributed to this even further, having examined de Broglie’s experiments he found one commonality among them all. He called this, the wave equation (Figure 5). He went on to employ this equation in creating a picture of what the hydrogen atom looks like and found that the electron occupied multiple wave function “orbitals” around the nucleus each with differing probabilities of where the electron is most likely to be found when observed (Figure