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I was reading a book (Sears Zemansky) about this subject but I didn't understand something of an example, and this is that according to me there should be a process of emission for each of absorption (and vice versa), or am I wrong?.

In the example the statement says that a hypothetical atom has 3 possible levels of energy, the fundamental, 1eV and 3eV, with the following possible transitions.

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But why there is not the transition from 1eV to 3eV?.

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The reason is because there are no particles at the 1eV level to absorb the energy. In the ground state, all the particles are at the lowest level.

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  • $\begingroup$ Haha, thx, I didn't read that for the b) part they were asking me the absorb transitions from the ground state. $\endgroup$
    – OiciTrap
    Dec 6, 2014 at 16:49

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