Photo-electric absorption in hydrogen-like atoms

Extract

If light of a frequency which corresponds to an energy greater than the ionisation potential falls on an atom, an electron may be ejected and energy absorbed. To calculate the absorption coefficient, or the rate of absorption of energy per unit intensity of incident radiation for a given frequency, one must first choose a model for the atom. If we confine ourselves to the inner K electrons there will be two electrons in this shell for the heavier atoms, and a fairly good model of the atom is obtained by considering each electron to be moving independently in a central field of force due to the charged nucleus: i.e. we neglect electronic interaction and assume that the wave functions for the system are hydrogenic. Some writers make a partial correction for this neglect of interaction by modifying the central charge through the introduction of a screening factor which is so chosen that the minimum calculated energy required to remove one of the K electrons will agree with the experimental value provided by the K absorption edge. In general, however, the approximation is fairly good, and this is particularly so in the interior of a star where the atoms are highly ionised. It is not so good when the atom is bound as in a metal, and, of course, most of the laboratory work has been carried out on atoms in this bound state.