Helium metastability 2026-10-20
The low levels of a helium atom lack an allowed direct electric dipole decay to the ground level. The triplet is excluded by the spin selection rule, and the singlet-to-singlet transition is excluded by parity and orbital selection. Weaker radiative channels and collisions can still de-excite these states; metastable does not mean infinitely lived.
Optical absorption in organic semiconductors 2026-10-20
Molecular excitations in organic semiconductors often retain strong local character. Weak screening supports Frenkel excitons or intermolecular charge-transfer admixtures, so a photon can create a bound neutral excitation rather than free carriers. Transition dipoles, spin selection rules, molecular packing and Franck-Condon factors set the bright spectral features. Disorder and thermal vibrations broaden them. Electronic overlap can also produce more delocalized excitons; the molecular limit is a useful model, not a definition covering every organic solid.
Here , so the ground term is . There are no spin-allowed d–d bands in the displayed manifold under the spin selection rule: the excited terms shown have doublet or quartet rather than sextet multiplicity. Very weak spin-forbidden absorptions can still gain intensity through spin–orbit coupling, and even spin-allowed d–d transitions would be forbidden by the Laporte rule in ideal centrosymmetric coordination. Thus a strong ordinary d–d spectrum should not be predicted simply by multiplying the splitting by a numerical factor. For scale, the lowest quartet branches read roughly at this abscissa, corresponding to weak features around , and if such forbidden intensity is detectable. These are graphical estimates, not precision assignments of every weak line.