This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. If an article link referred you here, you might want to go back and fix it to point directly to the intended page.
Our understanding of how electrons behave has been significantly modified during the past century, the greatest advances being the development of quantum mechanics in the 20th century and the idea of wave-particle duality, that is, that electrons show both wave-like and particle-like properties, to varying degrees.
Electron beams are used in welding, lithography, scanning electron microscopes and transmission electron microscopes.
The antimatter counterpart of the electron is the positron.
Electrons are bound to the nucleus by photons carrying the electromagnetic force.
Under some circumstances an electron may be excited to a higher energy level (that is, it absorbs energy from an external source and leaps to a higher shell), leaving a space in a lower shell.
An electron may move from a lower-energy orbital to a higher-energy orbital by absorbing a photon with energy equal to the difference between the energies of the two levels.