Improvements of theoretical background and experiment on atomic spectra for high school and university students
The study of atomic spectra is one of the key subjects in teaching physics. It represents a combination of topics such as wave physics, atomic physics, particle physics, etc. Because of its complexity, it takes a well-prepared student and a very creative and resourceful teacher for this subject to be adequately understood and comprehended. This article presents theoretical background with key points in physics that help teachers to better organize their preparation for students and different experimental sets for this specific experiment, such as Nikola Tesla’s transformer or some other high-voltage transformers. Another point of view for this experiment is a variety of subexperiment possibilities to choose from in the execution of this practical exercise. This article also brings some difficulties that both teachers and students experience while preparing or doing this experiment, such as lack of more profound quantum physics knowledge since the conventional approach in teaching this specific topic in high schools and universities focuses on an introductory course in the history of this topic-oriented towards early years of the 20th century.