My question isn't how they receive the energy to jump, but why. When someone views an element's emission spectrum, we see a line spectrum which proves that they don't exist outside of their orbitals (else we would see a continuous spectrum). Electrons can be released in the form of beta decay, thus proving that they are capable of traveling outside of orbitals contrary to the statement my teacher said that they stay within orbitals. Then, to add to the confusion, the older model of rings floating around a nucleus has, from what I can tell, been outdated, which would support this model. My teacher's explanation was that the electrons made a quantum jump of some kind. How do electrons move between orbitals or do we know how they jump, excluding the reason that energy causes them to jump, and why are positrons formed sometimes instead of electrons in Beta decay?
When I'm asking "how do electrons jump" I would like to know how an electron can jump between each orbital such as how it moves and how it knows where to jump since it appears to be a jump where the electron doesn't slow into a orbital position. Specifically how they jump what is this Atomic electron transition, I understand that they jump and that they do this through absorbing and releasing energy but what is this Atomic electron transition other than what is already on the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_electron_transition.
[Physics] How do electrons jump orbitals
atomic-physicselectronsorbitalsquantum mechanicsradiation
Best Answer
The answers so far seem pretty good, but I'd like to try a slightly different angle.
Before I get to atomic orbitals, what does it mean for an electron to "be" somewhere? Suppose I look at an electron, and see where it is (suppose I have a very sophisticated/sensitive/precise microscope). This sounds straightforward, but what did I do when I 'looked' at the electron? I must have observed some photon that had just interacted with that electron. If I want to get an idea of the motion of the electron (no just its instantaneous momentum, but its position as a function of time), I need to observe it for a period of time. This is a problem, though, because I can only observe the electron every time it interacts with a photon that I can observe. It's actually impossible for me to observe the electron continuously, I can only get snapshots of its position.
So what does the electron do between observations? I don't think anyone can answer that question. All we can say is that at one time the electron was observed at point A, and at a later time it was observed at point B. It got from A to B... somehow. This leads to a different way of thinking about where an electron (or other particle) is.
If I know some of the properties of the electron, I can predict that I'm more likely to observe an electron in some locations than in others. Atomic orbitals are a great example of this. An orbital is described by 4 quantum numbers, which I'll call $n$, $l$, $m$, $s$ (there are several notations; I think this one is reasonably common). $n$ is a description of how much energy the electron has, $l$ describes its total angular momentum, $m$ carries some information about the orientation of its angular momentum and $s$ characterizes its spin (spin is a whole topic on its own, for now let's just say that it's a property that the electron has). If I know these 4 properties of an electron that is bound to an atom, then I can predict where I am most likely to observe the electron. For some combinations of $(n,l,m,s)$ the distribution is simple (e.g. spherically symmetric), but often it can be quite complicated (with lobes or rings where I'm more likely to find the electron). There's always a chance I could observe the electron ANYWHERE, but it's MUCH MORE LIKELY that I'll find it in some particular region. This is usually called the probability distribution for the position of the electron. Illustrations like these are misleading because they draw a hard edge on the probability distribution; what's actually shown is the region where the electron will be found some high percentage of the time.
So the answer to how an electron "jumps" between orbitals is actually the same as how it moves around within a single orbital; it just "does". The difference is that to change orbitals, some property of the electron (one of the ones described by $(n,l,m,s)$) has to change. This is always accompanied by emission or absorption of a photon (even a spin flip involves a (very low energy) photon).
Another way of thinking about this is that the electron doesn't have a precise position but instead occupies all space, and observations of the electron position are just manifestations of the more fundamental "wave function" whose properties dictate, amongst other things, the probability distribution for observations of position.