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  Home > JCE Print > Journal of Chemical Education > Issues > 1999  > September  >
In the Laboratory
The Balmer Spectrum of Hydrogen: An Old Experiment with a New Twist
B. R. Ramachandran and Arthur M. Halpern
Indiana State University, Department of Chemistry, Terre Haute, IN 47809
Cover
September 1999
Vol. 76 No. 9
p. 1266
Abstract
This paper describes a novel twist to the undergraduate experiment in which students study the UV-visible emission produced from a deuterium discharge tube. In this approach, students do not have to make any assumptions about the nature of the emission lines in order to analyze the spectrum; they first perform a three-parameter nonlinear regression and discover that the emission belongs to the Balmer series and that the 656 nm line is the a line. Subsequently they perform a one-parameter nonlinear regression to obtain the value of the Rydberg constant.
Supplement
Supplementary material is a Microsoft Excel 97 (for Windows) workbook. It has been compressed into zip (for Windows) and sit (for Macintosh) files. It is also available as a pdf, accessible with Acrobat Reader.
*  Contents
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supp1266.zip

supp1266.sit

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More Information
*  Citation
 Ramachandran, B. R.; Halpern, Arthur M. J. Chem. Educ. 1999 76 1266.
*  Keywords
 Laboratory Instruction; Atomic Properties / Structure
*  History
 Created:
Last Updated:		 July 30, 1999
November 22, 2005
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