Role of core-scattered closed orbits in nonhydrogenic atoms

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Abstract
While both diamagnetic and Stark spectra of hydrogen can be analyzed accurately in terms of classical orbits, in nonhydrogenic atoms the multielectron core induces additional spectral modulations that cannot be analyzed reliably in terms of standard periodic orbit-type theories. However, by extending closed-orbit theory to include core-scattered waves consistently, both diamagnetic and Stark photoabsorption spectra of nonhydrogenic Rydberg atoms at constant scaled energy can be analyzed semiclassically using only the closed orbits of the corresponding hydrogenic systems. Frequencies and amplitudes of the core-scattered modulations, as well as corrected amplitudes for contributions from repetitions of primitive hydrogenic orbits, are found to be in excellent agreement with quantum results. We consider whether these nonhydrogenic systems correspond to quantum chaos. © 1996 The American Physical Society.