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The Stark Effect For N
The Stark Effect For N
The Stark effect for the n=2 states of hydrogen requires the use of degenerate state
perturbation theory since there are four states with (nearly) the same energies. For our
first calculation, we will ignore the hydrogen fine structure and assume that the four
, , and .
Now, in fact, most of the matrix elements of are zero. We will show that
The equation (labeled with the basis states to define the order) is.
and .
What remains is to compute .
Recall and .
This is first order in the electric field, as we would expect in first order (degenerate)
perturbation theory.
If the states are not exactly degenerate, we have to leave in the diagonal terms
where comes from some other perturbation, like the hydrogen fine structure.
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