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European Journal of Physics

Looking back into Bohr's atom

Bibhas Bhattacharyya

Published Feb 28, 2006• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The present work reconsiders Bohr's theory of hydrogenic atoms from a different point of view. Instead of the traditional approach based on the balancing of forces acting on the electron, this work takes up the correspondence principle as a starting point for calculation of the electronic energy levels.
DOI
10.1088/0143-0807/27/3/003

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The Bohr formulation—the original one—is now largely a matter of history. The usual career of a theory was its fate. It explained much, but it failed at the first signs of complication, even for the simplest molecules as hydrogen and helium. Some results were either only approximate in a loose or incomplete fashion, e.g. in the application of the correspondence principle to intensities, the only reliable predictions being only for an absence of certain lines, or they quite disagreed with experiment, e.g. in the case of the hydrogen molecule and the hydrogen molecule ion, the normal and excited states of helium, the anomalous Zeeman effect, the Ramsauer effect (the phenomenon of the deflection of electrons at low speeds being less than at higher speeds in atomic collisions), and in the treatment of problems where more than one electron was involved. In the last mentioned cases the perturbation method, so successful in solving “many-body” problems in celestial mechanics, failed completely because systems of several electrons, possessing frequencies of the order of light waves, cannot interact classically. A bit of much forced pragmatism was practiced in treating the many electron atom as a variation of the hydrogen atom. Besides, there were technical oddities, like ½ quantum numbers, and impenetrated anologies between visible and X-ray spectra.
In his doctoral thesis in 1911, Bohr reached the conclusion that at thermal equilibrium metal atom has no magnetic effect. Therefore, when establishing the hydrogen atom model in 1913, he did not consider the Lorentz force, but only the Coulomb force. The radius of the hydrogen atom he obtained is half smaller, and the orbital rotation frequency is twice larger. It must be multiplied by 1/2 to be consistent with the value of the Rydberg experiment. He proposed to calculate the photon frequency by using the average value of the zero frequency of infinite quantum number and the basic frequency, but it is not applicable to the energy levels for the ordinary quantum numbers, and later he called it the correspondence principle. In our modified Bohr model, we eliminate and solve Bohr's half frequency problem; The photon energy is equal to the difference between the two energy levels, and the photon frequency is equal to the difference between the two rotation frequencies of the electron; All excited states of hydrogen atom are elliptical orbits, and the nucleus is located in the center of the ellipse; The microscopic model of photonic structure is established, and the microscopic mechanism of atomic luminescence and quantum entanglement is given.
It is widely known that both the Correspondence Principle and the Adiabatic Principle were the two pillars of Bohr's quantum theory. However, the Correspondence Principle usually gets much more attention in historical accounts. A closer look at Bohr's quantum theory shows that, although the fate of the Adiabatic Principle was closely tied up with the validity of mechanics, it also played a significant role in the old quantum theory. In the early 1920s, when dealing with multielectron atoms, Bohr was forced to reshape the theory and thus to reconsider the relative relevance of the two principles. It is precisely the late preponderance of the Correspondence Principle which has, in perspective, biased the historical weight attributed to each of them.