Do electrons really perform instantaneous quantum leaps?
Do electrons change orbitals as per QM instantaneously?
In every reasonable interpretation of this question, the answer is no. But there are historical and sociological reasons why a lot of people say the answer is yes.
Consider an electron in a hydrogen atom which falls from the $2p$ state to the $1s$ state. The quantum state of the electron over time will be (assuming one can just trace out the environment without issue) $$|\psi(t) \rangle = c_1(t) |2p \rangle + c_2(t) | 1s \rangle.$$ Over time, $c_1(t)$ smoothly decreases from one to zero, while $c_2(t)$ smoothly increases from zero to one. So everything happens continuously, and there are no jumps. (Meanwhile, the expected number of photons in the electromagnetic field also smoothly increases from zero to one, via continuous superpositions of zero-photon and one-photon states.)
The reason some people might call this an instantaneous jump goes back to the very origins of quantum mechanics. In these archaic times, ancient physicists thought of the $|2 p \rangle$ and $|1 s \rangle$ states as classical orbits of different radii, rather than the atomic orbitals we know of today. If you take this naive view, then the electron really has to teleport from one radius to the other.
It should be emphasized that, even though people won't stop passing on this misinformation, this view is completely wrong. It has been known to be wrong since the advent of the Schrodinger equation almost $100$ years ago. The wavefunction $\psi(\mathbf{r}, t)$ evolves perfectly continuously in time during this process, and there is no point when one can say a jump has "instantly" occurred.
One reason one might think that jumps occur even while systems aren't being measured, if you have an experimental apparatus that can only answer the question "is the state $|2p \rangle$ or $|1s \rangle$", then you can obviously only get one or the other. But this doesn't mean that the system must teleport from one to the other, any more than only saying yes or no to a kid constantly asking "are we there yet?" means your car teleports.
Another, less defensible reason, is that people are just passing it on because it's a well-known example of "quantum spookiness" and a totem of how unintuitive quantum mechanics is. Which it would be, if it were actually true. I think needlessly mysterious explanations like this hurt the public understanding of quantum mechanics more than they help.
Is this change limited by the speed of light or not?
In the context of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, nothing is limited by the speed of light because the theory doesn't know about relativity. It's easy to take the Schrodinger equation and set up a solution with a particle moving faster than light. However, the results will not be trustworthy.
Within nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, there's nothing that prevents $c_1(t)$ from going from one to zero arbitrarily fast. In practice, this will be hard to realize because of the energy-time uncertainty principle: if you would like to force the system to settle into the $|1 s \rangle$ state within time $\Delta t$, the overall energy has an uncertainty $\hbar/\Delta t$, which becomes large. I don't think speed-of-light limitations are relevant for common atomic emission processes.
- No. Instantaneous state transfer violates causality, which is a premise of all rational deterministic theories in natural philosophy. Like two magnets clicking together once they are in close proximity, the state transfer can occur very quickly relative to our perception and so can be considered "approximately" instantaneous, but this approximation only applies to systems that do not take time periods of this finer granularity into account. The term "instant" is often hyperbole, as it depends on your measurement interval--all that it conveys is that the event occurs within a lapse of time too small to be measured using the present apparatus.
- I don't see why the speed of the transfer would be limited by the perceived speed of light.