The Bohr correspondence-principle (cp) formula dE/dn=ℏω is presented (ω is the classical angular frequency) and its predicted energy levels En are compared to those given by the stationary state solutions of the Schrödinger equation, first for several examples in one dimension (1D), including the ‘‘quantum bouncer,’’ and then for several examples in three dimensions (3D), including the hydrogen atom and the isotropic harmonic oscillator. For the 3-D cases, the cp predictions based on classical circular orbits are compared with the ‘‘circlelike’’ Schrödinger solutions (those with the lowest energy eigenvalue for a given l) and the cp predictions based on classical ‘‘needle’’ orbits (having zero angular momentum) with the Schrödinger l=0 solutions. For the H atom and the isotropic oscillator, the cp prediction does not depend on the classical orbit chosen because of a ‘‘degeneracy’’: the fact that for these systems ω is independent of the orbit. As a more stringent test of the cp, analogous nondegenerate systems V=−k/r3/2 in place of the H-atom potential V=−e2/r and V=kr4 in place of the oscillator potential V=(1/2)mω2r2 are therefore considered. An interesting anomaly that occurs for the harmonic oscillator and its nondegenerate analog V=kr4 is encountered (but not for the H atom nor its nondegenerate analog V=−k/r3/2), wherein half of the states predicted by application of the cp to the needle orbits are ‘‘spurious’’ in that there are no corresponding Schrödinger l=0 states. The assumption that generated the spurious cp states is uncovered—a plausible, but erroneous factor of 2 in calculating the classical frequency—and thus the spurious states are eliminated.
The Bohr correspondence-principle (cp) formula dE/dn=ℏω is presented (ω is the classical angular frequency) and its predicted energy levels En are compared to those given by the stationary state solutions of the Schrödinger equation, first for several examples in one dimension (1D), including the ‘‘quantum bouncer,’’ and then for several examples in three dimensions (3D), including the hydrogen atom and the isotropic harmonic oscillator. For the 3-D cases, the cp predictions based on classical circular orbits are compared with the ‘‘circlelike’’ Schrödinger solutions (those with the lowest energy eigenvalue for a given l) and the cp predictions based on classical ‘‘needle’’ orbits (having zero angular momentum) with the Schrödinger l=0 solutions. For the H atom and the isotropic oscillator, the cp prediction does not depend on the classical orbit chosen because of a ‘‘degeneracy’’: the fact that for these systems ω is independent of the orbit. As a more stringent test of the cp, analogous nondegenerate systems V=−k/r3/2 in place of the H-atom potential V=−e2/r and V=kr4 in place of the oscillator potential V=(1/2)mω2r2 are therefore considered. An interesting anomaly that occurs for the harmonic oscillator and its nondegenerate analog V=kr4 is encountered (but not for the H atom nor its nondegenerate analog V=−k/r3/2), wherein half of the states predicted by application of the cp to the needle orbits are ‘‘spurious’’ in that there are no corresponding Schrödinger l=0 states. The assumption that generated the spurious cp states is uncovered—a plausible, but erroneous factor of 2 in calculating the classical frequency—and thus the spurious states are eliminated.
The first application of quantum ideas to a system with a nonuniform potential energy is to the harmonic oscillator: a pendulum, or a mass on a spring. The result is a quantization of energy with equally spaced energy levels. The wave function is localized in the potential well but can do quantum tunneling beyond the turning points into classically forbidden regions. A wave function can be a negative quantity, but the related position probability is always positive. The wave function shows the particle is not in any single place; in a sense it is in many places simultaneously. The fact that the lowest energy quantum state does not vanish is an example of zero-point energy. States of very high energy show a strong analogy to classical oscillator behavior, an example of the Bohr correspondence principle.
Bohr's 1913 trilogy marks a turning point in the history of quantum physics for its introduction of the planetary model of the atom and its derivation of the Balmer formula for the hydrogen spectrum. It has been studied in the seminal study 1 and is discussed more recently by 2-4. Famously, Bohr's classical paper made two utterly non-classical assumptions, according to which electrons orbited the nucleus in stationary states without losing energy while they emitted radiation only in transitions between these states. As I will argue in this paper, Bohr's 1913 trilogy made a third crucial major assumption, which entailed key elements of the correspondence principle formulated five years later. This third assumption postulated a relation between the mechanical frequency of a stationary state and the radiation frequency in analogy with classical radiation theory. Though this relation was in direct conflict with the key assumptions of stationary states and transitions, Bohr's reasoning—as I want to show—relied heavily on it, and a major part of his initial work was devoted to clarifying how the connection of radiation and motion, the stationary states and the transitions were interrelated. The main aim of Bohr's 1913 trilogy was to derive the Balmer formula from the newly-proposed atomic model. After the introduction of the stationary states and the frequency condition, the derivation follows a three-step recipe consisting of the calculation of the energy from classical mechanics, the quantization of the energy and finally the calculation of the spectral frequencies via the Planck Relation . Given the simplicity of the system considered and the assumption of the stationary states and the frequency condition, the first and last step did not call for an extended argument and Bohr simply gave the relevant equations. As Bohr explicitly acknowledged, the classical radiation mechanism was replaced entirely by the fundamental assumptions of his model: radiation is produced through a transition between stationary states. Though 1 was in direct conflict with the physical assumptions of his model, Bohr's thinking nonetheless depended crucially on it. This is emphasized by the fact that Bohr knew that he could quantize the orbits on the assumption that the angular momentum of the atom is equal to .1 While 1 could not be interpreted as a description of a physical process in a classical sense, Bohr kept the equation and explored its conceptual significance within his new quantum theory of the atom. This was a vital concern for Bohr, first, because he needed a justification; second, because he hoped for insights on how to develop the theory by investigating which parts of classical radiation theory could still be used within the new model. The investigation of this question loomed large in Bohr's 1913 paper and continued to play an important role in his early work on the quantum theory of the atom. For the preceding argument Bohr justified the radiation-motion relation by means of a comparison between the radiation process and the motion of the electron before and after the radiation process. This justification itself was not very convincing: it rested solely on its empirical success and the questionable mean-value argument, and Bohr decided to give a second derivation of the Balmer formula to add further plausibility to 1. Already his first hand waving argument, however, points to some of the central aspects of his attempt to connect radiation and electronic motion: In light of the missing radiation mechanism in quantum theory, Bohr tried to recover a relation between radiation and electronic motion within quantum theory analogous to the one in classical radiation theory. He refrained from proposing a new hypothetical radiation mechanism and shied away from such assumptions until 1924. Instead he resorted to experimental, mathematical and intertheoretical arguments to construct a formal relation between radiation and matter and aimed to get insights into the properties of a radiation mechanism yet to be found. In order to be equivalent to the empirical Balmer formula this function has to be , as Bohr showed by comparing the frequency of a quantum transition and the orbiting frequencies of the stationary states in the case of high quantum numbers, in which classical electrodynamics and quantum theory predict the same numerical value for the radiation frequency. This result implied the consistency of his major assumptions, the radiation-motion connection and the Balmer formula, which entered as an empirical constraint. For the argument the high quantum number limit plays an important role as it renders the condition for the consistency precisely and shows that the assumption of a relation between radiation and motion within quantum theory leads to the agreement of quantum theory and classical theory in this limit. The possibility of an emission of a radiation of such a frequency may also be interpreted from analogy with ordinary electrodynamics, as an electron rotating round a nucleus in an elliptical orbit will emit a radiation which according to Fourier's theorem can be resolved into homogeneous components, the frequencies of which are [5, 14]. This recapturing of the relation between orbital frequency and the radiation frequency is part of Bohr's conclusion: While classical electrodynamics in general is in contradiction with the basic assumptions of the Bohr model, the classical relation between the frequency of radiation and the mechanical frequency can be established at least in the classical limit as a formal relation. To show this is as important to Bohr as to show that his new model predicts the correct Balmer formula. As such the classical relation between motion and radiation is indispensable for Bohr's early work as a touchstone for his two derivations and it is of vital concern in the attempt to explore the break and the continuity with classical radiation theory. The radiation-motion relation continued to play an important role in Bohr's works following the 1913 trilogy; after he had finished his initial papers Bohr adapted his model to account for the Stark and Zeeman effects. The relation between radiation and motion played a major role in the initial work establishing the Bohr model and its extension to the Stark and Zeeman effect. Stemming from classical radiation theory this relation was in contradiction with the major assumptions of the new model of the atom; nonetheless, Bohr's thinking relied heavily on the radiation-motion connection both in establishing his results and in clarifying the foundations of the new model. Compared with his later statements on the correspondence principle there is a remarkable resemblance between the statements in 1913/1914 and the correspondence idea between 1918 and 1923: In both cases the relation between the orbiting frequency and the frequency of radiation and the asymptotic limit between quantum theory and classical electrodynamics were at the core of Bohr's reasoning. Also the idea of the Fourier series is mentioned, which would become ever more important in the development of the correspondence idea.5 While the core elements of the later principle are already apparent in the early phase, they are used very differently in both phases. This shift in the usage of the basic correspondence relation was due to the development of the quantum theory of the atom as a whole. The physicists who developed Bohr's initial model mainly extended the description of the stationary states to more complicated systems with the help of celestial mechanics. In this context the relation between the radiation frequency and the orbiting frequency was replaced by Sommerfeld's quantum condition: . The new relation did not involve any assumptions on the radiation process or the interaction between radiation and matter, it was a statement about the action of a mechanical system and its quantization. The fruitfulness of this new quantization condition led physicists including Bohr to abandon the early quantization procedure. Through this abandonment, the frequency condition became the sole relation of radiation theory, which was needed to determine the series formulae describing atomic spectra. Whereas the loss of the classical radiation mechanism had been a vital concern for Bohr in his early works, this was no longer the case in the development of the quantum theory of the atom. The relation should, however, resurface in Bohr's thinking about the transitions in quantum theory and in this form led to the formulation of the correspondence principle.
The Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, despite its heuristic success in predicting discrete energy levels, is fundamentally incompatible with the probabilistic interpretation of modern quantum mechanics. In this work, we present a pedagogical derivation of Bohr’s results directly from the time-independent Schrödinger equation in three dimensions. By applying two successive geometric constraints, first, a genuine dimensional reduction to a 2D planar system (not a naive restriction of the spherical Laplacian), and second, a radial localization to a fixed radius, we demonstrate that the resulting radial-azimuthal equation yields the quantized Bohr orbits. We show that the energy levels En = −13.6/n2 eV and orbital radii r[n] = n² ao emerge naturally from the wavefunction normalization combined with the de Broglie standing-wave condition. Special attention is given to the correct form of the 2D Laplacian, which differs from the 3D Laplacian restricted to θ = π/2 by a term (1/r) ∂/∂r. This approach provides a clear conceptual bridge between the diffuse quantum cloud and the classical planetary picture.
Bohr's atomic theory is widely viewed as remarkable, both for its accuracy in predicting the observed optical transitions of one-electron atoms and for its failure to fully correspond with current electronic structure theory. What is not generally appreciated is that Bohr's original semiclassical conception differed significantly from the Bohr-Sommerfeld theory and offers an alternative semiclassical approximation scheme with remarkable attributes. More specifically, Bohr's original method did not impose action quantization constraints but rather obtained these as predictions by simply matching photon and classical orbital frequencies. In other words, the hydrogen atom was treated entirely classically and orbital quantized emerged directly from the Planck-Einstein photon quantization condition, E = h nu. Here, we revisit this early history of quantum theory and demonstrate the application of Bohr's original strategy to the three quintessential quantum systems: an electron in a box, an electron in a ring, and a dipolar harmonic oscillator. The usual energy-level spectra, and optical selection rules, emerge by solving an algebraic (quadratic) equation, rather than a Bohr-Sommerfeld integral (or Schroedinger) equation. However, the new predictions include a frozen (zero-kinetic-energy) state which in some (but not all) cases lies below the usual zero-point energy. In addition to raising provocative questions concerning the origin of quantum-chemical phenomena, the results may prove to be of pedagogical value in introducing students to quantum mechanics.
The atom model of Niels Bohr is commonly considered as antiquated even if it describes the atomic spectrum of hydrogen quite accurately. The later published relation of Louis De Broglie could arithmetically be implemented into Bohr’s formulation, leading to the concept of standing waves as the existence cause of excited electron states. However, at that time it was not possible to find well defined electron trajectories being classically describable. As a consequence, the »quantum mechanics« were developed by several authors, particularly by Schrodinger and by Heisenberg, but delivering a hardly under¬standable formalism where the classical physical laws appear being abrogated while abstract terms replace concrete and imaginable ones, abandoning the particle perception of mass points. In particular, Heisenberg’s »uncertainty principle« and the assumption of state probabilities seem to be in a striking variance to the idea of standing waves. In contrast, a formulation is given here which exactly describes the electron trajectories in the exited states solely by applying classical physical laws. Firstly, the original Bohr-model - in combination with De Broglie’s relation - is rolled up. From this formula system a vibration frequency - corresponding to the De-Broglie frequency – is deduced which is n-times larger than the rotation frequency of the Bohr-model. Furthermore, a direct coherence between that vibration-frequency of the electron and the frequency of the involved light is evident being explainable as a resonance effect. Then, a three-dimensional model is proposed where the electron oscillates and pulses perpendicularly to a virtual rotation plane i.e. rotating around a vertical axis, accompanied by a perpetual energy exchange between potential and kinetic energy. This leads at the excited, metastable energy states to well-defined, three-dimensional and wavy trajectories winding up on a surface similar to the one of a hyperboloid, whereas at the ground state the trajectory is planar and stable.