Talk:Rydberg atom

By my standards, this is a surprisingly accurate, complete article that is neither too elementary nor too advanced. The only significant fix would be to add more references with in-text citations. Teply (talk) 04:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Further work
I have added detailed references. I think there are improvements to be made, which I will work on in due course:


 * Details about precession of electron orbits due to core polarization effects (see ref 4, Hezel et al)
 * A replacement for the 1/r potential image showing a comparison of A/r with A/r + B/r4 —Preceding unsigned comment added by DJIndica (talk • contribs) 12:49, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * More on the quantum defect, which defines how "hydrogenic" a state is
 * Rydberg matter should either get its own subsection or be relegated to only "see also"

--DJIndica (talk) 23:39, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

'Very high quantum number'
From the introduction: "... one or more electrons with a very high principal quantum number". How high is 'very high'? Later the figure n=137 is mentioned. Is this an indicative value? Could someone clarify - I would have thought n=10 was very high, but perhaps I'm off by an order of magnitude? Perhaps someone could add some quantification to the introduction, eg "typically n > 100". Thanks! 81.101.47.123 (talk) 12:52, 23 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree that this definition does not seem very rigorous, but that is how it is almost universally stated. A better definition is the similarity to the potential in a hydrogen atom, as discussed in the article.  From this perspective all states of H, He+, Li2+,... are Rydberg states.  How high you have to go to be in a Rydberg state in a multi-electron atom depends on the system, and particularly the orbital angular momentum, and is not strictly defined.


 * The principle quantum number can go arbitrarily high, with the electron getting further from the ion core and adjacent states becoming more and more closely spaced. The n=∞ state corresponds to the ground state of the ion (the electron is infinitely far away).  So you can judge the Rydberg nature of a state by its similarity to the ionic ground state.


 * You are correct that states in the n=10 manifold are generally considered Rydberg states, but they can go much higher than that.--DJIndica (talk) 18:10, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I adjusted the article wording slightly. It had explicitly stated that any atom with any electron in an n>1 level was considered a Rydberg atom but it also stated that the term only included excited states in which an electron was promoted into a formerly-unoccupied n level. Those are contradictory for any element with an electronic configuration that includes more than two electrons. I altered to be consistent that the ground state need not have all electrons in n=1 and therefore Rydberg is electrons excited into higher n than normal. It's still by analogy to H, and H/He+/Li2+ are still included in this adjusted wording, but now it's not restricted to them. Rb0 and others appear to have been studied. DMacks (talk) 18:03, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20050826121501/http://www.sunysb.edu:80/metcalf/rydbergprint.htm to http://www.sunysb.edu/metcalf/rydbergprint.htm

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Rydberg body
It is proposed that the black hole ringularity and the cosmic pre-inflationary state were Rydberg bodies.