Abstract
Since the early days of quantum mechanics, the theory of atomic line radiation has been of central interest in atomic physics. Percival and Seaton1 presented a general treatment of the subject that has been widely used by both experimentalists and theoreticians. They briefly review the “Oppenheimer-Penney (O.-P.) theory of polarization” and later criticize it for not satisfying the “principle of spectroscopic stability”. This principle requires, for example, that results obtained in a ∣J,M coupling scheme involving the total electronic angular momentum J and its component M j with regard to a specified quantization axis, must be identical to those obtained in an ∣L,M coupling scheme (where L and S are the orbital and spin angular momenta with components M L and M 5 in the limit of vanishing fine-struct ure splitting in the target states. A similar argument can be made for hyperfine-structure effects due to a non-vanishing nuclear spin of the target.
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References
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© 1996 Plenum Press
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Bartschat, K. (1996). A Density Matrix Treatment of Atomic Line Radiation. In: Campbell, D.M., Kleinpoppen, H. (eds) Selected Topics on Electron Physics. Physics of Atoms and Molecules. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0421-0_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0421-0_13
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