# Excited Energy levels of Hydrogen vs Solids

My question has to do with Excited Energy Levels. I keep reading and learning that all objects/most solids emit infrared radiation. But to emit radiation, an object's particles must first enter a higher energy orbital (electrons) which will then immediately lead to the atom returning to its ground state, releasing the energy of the level jump from ground state to level 2 in eV in the form of a photon wave.

BUT! When I looked for information about energy levels of elements, I could only find hydrogen, and when I plugged in the energy for: l=hc/E where l is wavelength, h is Plancks constant, c is the speed of light, and E is energy of the photon.

The wavelength came up to be 1.121x10^-7! That is in the ultraviolet range! That means that it takes a ton of EM Energy to emit a photon wave! This doesn't make sense unless solids require much less energy to move up orbitals.

Is this true? What happened to Infrared or Radio? And how do I find out about energy levels of solid elements and understand the data?

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You're confusing spectral emissions with thermal emissions. –  Brandon Enright Mar 31 '14 at 19:20
Hydrogen is special in that low lying levels have large energy separation. For larger molecules and solids, energy spacing is much much smaller. –  QuantumDot Mar 31 '14 at 19:24

A solid material is a lot more complicated than the hydrogen atom, but you can imagine a larger atom as being similar to a hydrogen atom with many electrons occupying the energy levels. The hydrogen energy levels are $E_n=-{13.6\,\text{eV} \over n^2}$, so you can see that as you go to higher energies, the difference between the levels gets smaller. For example, $13.6 \,\text{eV}*(10^{-2}-11^{-2}) \approx .024 \,\text{eV}$ is infrared.
On top of that, there are various ways that the energy levels can be broadened into a range of values. Any state that has a finite lifetime will also have a nonzero linewidth (range of possible energies), to satisfy with the energy-time uncertainty relation, $\Delta E\Delta t \ge \hbar/2$. This is why we sometimes talk about solid materials like conductors have energy bands rather than levels.