Not the same as Hermite polynomials.

Quantum numbers appear directly in the Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom.

However, it very cool that they are actually discovered before the Schrödinger equation, and are present in the Bohr model (principal quantum number) and the Bohr-Sommerfeld model (azimuthal quantum number and magnetic quantum number) of the atom. This must be because they observed direct effects of those numbers in some experiments. TODO which experiments.

E.g. The Quantum Story by Jim Baggott (2011) page 34 mentions:This refers to forbidden mechanism. TODO concrete example, ideally the first one to be noticed. How can you notice this if the energy depends only on the principal quantum number?

TODO. Can't find it easily. Anyone?

This is closely linked to the Pauli exclusion principle.

What does a particle even mean, right? Especially in quantum field theory, where two electrons are just vibrations of a single electron field.

Another issue is that if we consider magnetism, things only make sense if we add special relativity, since Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so a non approximate solution for this will necessarily require full quantum electrodynamics.

As mentioned at lecture 1 youtube.com/watch?video=H3AFzbrqH68&t=555, relativistic quantum mechanical theories like the Dirac equation and Klein-Gordon equation make no sense for a "single particle": they must imply that particles can pop in out of existence.

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This notation is so confusing! People often don't manage to explain the intuition behind it, why this is an useful notation. When you see Indian university entry exam level memorization classes about this, it makes you want to cry.

The key reason why term symbols matter are Hund's rules, which allow us to predict with some accuracy which electron configurations of those states has more energy than the other.

web.chem.ucsb.edu/~devries/chem218/Term%20symbols.pdf puts it well: electron configuration notation is not specific enough, as each such notation e.g. 1s2 2s2 2p2 contains several options of spins and z angular momentum. And those affect energy.

This is why those symbols are often used when talking about energy differences: they specify more precisely which levels you are talking about.

Basically, each term symbol appears to represent a group of possible electron configurations with a given quantum angular momentum.

We first fix the energy level by saying at which orbital each electron can be (hyperfine structure is ignored). It doesn't even have to be the ground state: we can make some electrons excited at will.

The best thing to learn this is likely to draw out all the possible configurations explicitly, and then understand what is the term symbol for each possible configuration, see e.g. term symbols for carbon ground state.

It also confusing how uppercase letters S, P and D are used, when they do not refer to orbitals s, p and d, but rather to states which have the same angular momentum as individual electrons in those states.

It is also very confusing how extremelly close it looks to spectroscopic notation!

The form of the term symbol is:

The $2S+1$ can be understood directly as the degeneracy, how many configurations we have in that state.

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This example covered for example at Video 1. "Term Symbols Example 1 by TMP Chem (2015)".

Carbon has electronic structure 1s2 2s2 2p2.

For term symbols we only care about unfilled layers, because in every filled layer the total z angular momentum is 0, as one electron necessarily cancels out each other:

So in this case, we only care about the 2 electrons in 2p2. Let's list out all possible ways in which the 2p2 electrons can be.

There are 3 p orbitals, with three different magnetic quantum numbers, each representing a different possible z quantum angular momentum.

We are going to distribute 2 electrons with 2 different spins across them. All the possible distributions that don't violate the Pauli exclusion principle are:

m_l  +1  0 -1  m_L  m_S
     u_ u_ __    1    1
     u_ __ u_    0    1
     __ u_ u_   -1    1
     d_ d_ __    1   -1
     d_ __ d_    0   -1
     __ d_ d_   -1   -1
     u_ d_ __    1    0
     d_ u_ __    1    0
     u_ __ d_    0    0
     d_ __ u_    0    0
     __ u_ d_   -1    0
     __ d_ u_   -1    0
     ud __ __    2    0
     __ ud __    0    0
     __ __ ud   -2    0

where:

For example, on the first line:we have:and so the sum of them has angular momentum $0+1\hslash =1\hslash$. So the value of $m_L$ is 1, we just omit the $\hslash$.

TODO now I don't understand the logic behind the next steps... I understand how to mechanically do them, but what do they mean? Can you determine the term symbol for individual microstates at all? Or do you have to group them to get the answer? Since there are multiple choices in some steps, it appears that you can't assign a specific term symbol to an individual microstate. And it has something to do with the Slater determinant. The previous lecture mentions it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_8n1TS-8Y0 more precisely youtu.be/7_8n1TS-8Y0?t=2268 about carbon.

youtu.be/DAgEmLWpYjs?t=2675 mentions that ${}^{3}D$ is not allowed because it would imply $L=2,S=1$, which would be a state uu __ __ which violates the Pauli exclusion principle, and so was not listed on our list of 15 states.

He then goes for ${}^{1}D$ and mentions:and so that corresponds to states on our list:Note that for some we had a two choices, so we just pick any one of them and tick them off off from the table, which now looks like:

Then for ${}^{3}P$ the choices are:so we have 9 possibilities for both together. We again verify that 9 such states are left matching those criteria, and tick them off, and so on.

For the $m_S$, we have two electrons with spin up. The angular momentum of each electron is $1/2\hslash$, and so given that we have two, the total is $1\hslash$, so again we omit $\hslash$ and $m_S$ is 1.

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