I’ve understood that electrons move in a 3D field outside the nucleus and that they are quite far away from the nucleus itself (in relation to the atom scale).
What would happen if you pushed them out of this moving field of theirs, closer to the nucleus?
Let’s talk about orbital mechanics for a bit, and we’ll get back to electrons and protons.
Orbits happen because two objects are attracted to each other, but are moving too quickly in relation to each to actually collide with the other object. The faster the objects are moving, the wider the orbit, because they’re missing by a larger amount.
In order for an electron to get closer to a proton, you have to either increase the pull between them, such as with an electrical field, or slow down the electron somehow. Your answer depends on which of these things is happening.
If you push on it with something like an electrical field, the moment you stop pushing the orbit will correct itself, unless you pushed it so hard you got the electron to collide with a proton in the nucleus, in which case you get a neutron and a neutrino emitted. At some point in the future, it’ll probably decay into a proton and an electron again.
If you somehow just slow down the electron, you get a closer orbital shell, and it’ll stay there until something changes it’s velocity again. If you slow it down enough that it hits a proton in the nucleus, the same thing happens as above.
Is there a “spring” there then? Does the electron jump above its original orbit once you remove the external force and then oscillate a bit until it settles, or does it simply return to where it should be?
For a single electron, kind of. There’s no force acting on it outside of the attractive force between it and the nucleus, so it would just end up in an elliptical orbit, and if you just looked at the distance from center, it would appear to oscillate like a spring as it goes around.
This is misleading, though, because springs push and pull in both directions, and that’s not what’s happening here. What’s actually happening is something like Pluto’s orbit, where it’s closer than Neptune half the time and farther the other half, but nothing’s really making it do that besides geometry.
If you have other electrons, like in most atoms, now you get a repulsive force from the electrons, which are all in their own spherical shells, and they interfere with elliptical orbits enough that they eventually become spherical. This would look more like a spring eventually settling if you just look at distance from center.