Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom

Show body

Donald Trump 29 Updated 2024-10-08 Created 2022-11-02

Barack Obama 11 Updated 2024-10-08 Created 2022-11-02

Ciro Santilli 34 Updated 2024-11-19 Created 1970-01-01

Is the only atom that has a closed form solution, which allows for very good predictions, and gives awesome intuition about the orbitals in general.

It is arguably the most important solution of the Schrodinger equation.

In particular, it predicts:

the major spectral line of the hydrogen atom by taking the difference between energy levels

The explicit solution can be written in terms of spherical harmonics.

A Better Way To Picture Atoms by minutephysics (2021)

Source. Renderings based on the exact Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom that depict wave function concentration by concentration of small balls, and angular momentum by how fast the balls rotate at each point. Mentions that the approach is inspired by de Broglie-Bohm theory.