On the Energy Distribution of Terms and Line Arrays in Atomic Spectra

Abstract

The Coulomb interaction leads to a splitting of the different terms belonging to the same many-electron configuration. We have studied the resulting energy distributions of terms and also of line arrays for transitions between different configurations. Expressions are derived for the first two moments of the distributions, namely, the average energy shift and the mean square deviation, as a function of the number of particles. The detailed shapes of the distributions are investigated both for (d)n configurations and for a simplified two-dimensional model.