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  Home > JCE Print > Journal of Chemical Education > Issues > 1998  > January  >
Research: Science and Education
A Modern Approach to L-S Coupling in the Theory of Atomic Spectra
Graham Doggett and Brian Sutcliffe
University of York, Chemistry Department, Heslington, York Y01 5DD, United Kingdom
Cover
January 1998
Vol. 75 No. 1
p. 110
Abstract
In a recent article on the theory of atomic spectroscopy (1), Haigh remarks that "Many introductory textbooks on spectroscopy give satisfactory accounts of Russell-Saunders (LS) coupling, but their treatment of jj coupling is generally very brief." Although we do not wish to dissent from his sentiments on j-j coupling, we wonder whether the treatment of L-S coupling usually offered in introductory texts for term enumeration is not too old-fashioned to still be considered entirely satisfactory. In this article we present an approach to the construction of L-S terms that makes contact with modern group theoretical and tensorial approaches to the theory of atomic spectra and is as easy to present and to comprehend as is the old microstates approach (2, 3). We believe that it is at least as easy to use as the approach of Guofan and Elizey (4) presented in this Journal some ten years ago: in fact, we have been teaching the enumeration of L-S terms for the past ten years using the methods presented in Section 2.
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*  Citation
 Doggett, Graham; Sutcliffe, Brian. J. Chem. Educ. 1998 75 110.
*  Keywords
*  History
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Last Updated:		 June 28, 1999
June 23, 2005
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