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When you electrify a tube of pure neon gas, it doesn't emit a smooth rainbowβ€”it glows with a piercing, signature red-orange.
Every element in the universe produces its own unique set of colors, acting like a cosmic barcode for atoms.

Quantized Energy Levels

In 1913, Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed that electrons in an atom cannot orbit at just any distance; they are restricted to specific, fixed rungs called quantized energy levels.
The lowest possible energy state of an atom is its ground state (n=1n=1), while higher states are called excited states (n=2,3,4,…n=2, 3, 4, \dots).
An electron can never hover between levelsβ€”it must make a complete leap, known as a quantum transition.
How do these sudden leaps translate directly into colored light?

Absorption and Emission

A photon is a discrete packet or particle of light energy.
During absorption, an electron absorbs an incoming photon whose energy matches the gap between levels, jumping to a higher energy level.
During emission, an excited electron drops to a lower level, releasing a photon carrying the exact difference in energy between those two levels.
By the law of conservation of energy, the energy of the absorbed or emitted photon (EphotonE_{\text{photon}}) must equal the absolute difference in atomic energy levels (βˆ₯Ξ”Eβˆ₯\|\Delta E\|):