Über das Modell des Wasserstoffmolekülions. Offprint

Publisher Information: 1922.

Pauli, Wolfgang (1900-1958). Über das Modell des Wasserstoffmolekülions. Offprint from Annalen der Physik, 4th series, 68 (1922). 177-240pp. 227 x 145 mm. Without wrappers as issued, small chips at spine extremities. Minor toning but very good. Presented by Pauli to physicist Gregor Wentzel (1898-1978), with Pauli’s pencil inscription “Wentzel” on the first leaf.

First Edition, Rare Offprint Issue of Pauli’s doctoral thesis. At the urging of his teacher, Arnold Sommerfeld, Pauli chose as his topic the quantum theory of ionized molecular hydrogen (H2+), which contains two protons and one electron. As Heisenberg (also a student of Sommerfeld’s) later recalled, Pauli “wanted to examine if, in a complicated system for which one was just barely capable of doing the calculations, Bohr’s theory and the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantum conditions led to the experimentally correct result. For, in our Munich discussions doubts had come to us whether the hitherto obtained successes of the theory were not limited to simple systems and whether a failure might not occur already in the more complicated system” (quoted in Enz, No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli, p. 63). Pauli’s efforts, although they obtained him his doctorate, did not yield a successful quantum theory of H2+; according to Born, who reviewed Pauli’s work on H2+ in his Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, the resulting energy values “cannot be made to agree with the measurements of the ionization and excitation voltages” (quoted in Enz, p. 69). The problem of the hydrogen molecular ion was not solved until 1927, when Øyvind Burrau published the first successful quantum-mechanical treatment of H2+.

Book Id: 43387

Price: $2,750.00

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