system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is happening inside an atom that doesn't make an electron lose its energy the way it would in a cyclotron?

I understand the fundamentals of QM, that the atom acts as a potential well and the energy states get quantised, hence electrons can have only certain wavefunctions. But what about this quantisation 'stabilizes' the electron so that it doesn't radiate energy, the way it would if it was accelerating in a cyclotron?
gpt
Because an electron moving through a cyclotron isn’t in a bound state, it’s in a continuum state. It has a continuum of possible energies, and it can make transitions between those continuous-energy states by emitting photons.

(By the way, you wouldn’t want to use a cyclotron for electron beams, because they become relativistic too quickly, and then the cyclotron frequency has to change *synchronously* as the electron accelerates. This is why you’d use something like a *synchro*tron instead.)