Yes and no.
Eh, I think it’s an hard clear Yes. The radiation released by an element when coming out of an excited state depends on the energy difference between N levels and it is generally consistent for that given element.
How do they get excited? You give them energy. How? One way is by shinning a light.
Is there a name for radiation of a specific frequency within the visible spectrum? Yes. A color.
All rare gas lightbulbs even have a specific color.
The only way for us to discount the emission specturm as a color is if we go philosophical about the nature of color. And that’s for literary nerds, not physics nerds, and I doubt people google the former as frequently as the latter.
True, but a childish intuition about “having a color” would most likely imply that you can see a structure of the thing (like a ball) that is colored in (which you can’t with atoms). On the other hand if you consider an atom a tiny pointsource, like a star in the sky, then it makes sense again.
Instead of comparing it to a ball with colour on it, you could compare it to a ball of colour. Which atoms are.
if you tickle their electrons, they may laugh in the visible spectrum
The answer is no, but if you take an imaginative view of color charge in quarks then yes!
Because color is photons in a narrow range of wavelengths/energies visible to the human eye. Atoms have electrons that can emit and absorb photons under certain circumstances, but don’t have any intrinsic color themselves.
Color charge is a property of quarks thats trinary in nature, and is usually described in terms of red, green, and blue, since color is a useful analogy to how it functions. Despite the name, colored light and color charge are not actually related outside of the analogy.
This is one of those questions that seems really difficult to answer but I feel like it’s really easy to answer.
For one, we can quite easily assemble enough atoms to be visible and to interact with light and then look at the color that comes off of that, so in that instance yes atoms do have colors.
Colors are, after all, fundamental consequences of our perception of the electromagnetic frequencies of a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Do they tho? A single atom is too small to have an actual “color” I believe, and if you arrange them differently you’ll have different colors. For example, carbon arranged like a diamond is clear, but carbon in coal is black.
The carbon case is that light passes by, it’s beyond me but that comes down to molecular structure and not individual atoms.
Atoms actually have color, just not one. Atoms have these electron orbits, if an electron gets hit with the right energy (which is actual discreet energy levels) the electrons can jump to a higher orbit. It can then fall back, and emit light of a specific wavelength corresponding to that energy difference. It’s how spectroscopy works, by testing all visible colors of light (and probably outside visible spectrum too) you will get dark areas in the color band where said light/energy was absorbed.(because the emitted light of the same type that hit it goes off in random directions)
Each atom will therefore have a unique color strip for identification, so we can say atoms have colors!
Atoms have emmission spectra. That’s color. Average them if you want an aggregate.