Highly excited stated of atomic hydrogen in near-orthogonal electric and magnetic fields

D. Baye, N. Clerbaux, M Vincke

Petr A. Braun

A study is made of the first-order splitting of the Rydberg levels of alkali-metal atoms in weak mutually orthogonal electric and magnetic fields. It is shown that the majority of perturbed states belong to highly degenerate sublevels with the same energy as in the case of atomic hydrogen. For the rest of the states a method of energy calculation is described which does not involve numerical diagonalisation of huge perturbation matrices.

Munir Hasan Nayfeh, Kwan Ng, Decheng Yao

Jook T. M. Walraven, Raymond Van Roijen, Tom W. Hijmans

Munir Hasan Nayfeh

We excite atomic hydrogen from the ground state via a three-photon process to high-lying excited states in the presence of strong d.c. electric fields. The external field is used to manipulate, control, and design specific atomic structures. We can construct nearly ‘one-dimensional’ atoms whose electronic distributions are highly extended along the field, and which may have enormous electric dipole moments (‘giant-dipole atoms’).

Charles W. Clark, K. T. Lu, Anthony F. Starace