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Concept
Old quantum theory
Summary
The old quantum theory is a collection of results from the years 1900–1925 which predate modern quantum mechanics. The theory was never complete or self-consistent, but was rather a set of heuristic corrections to classical mechanics. The theory is now understood as the semi-classical approximation to modern quantum mechanics. The main and final accomplishments of the old quantum theory were the determination of the modern form of the periodic table by Edmund Stoner and the Pauli Exclusion Principle which were both premised on the Arnold Sommerfeld enhancements to the Bohr model of the atom.
The main tool of the old quantum theory was the Bohr–Sommerfeld quantization condition, a procedure for selecting out certain states of a classical system as allowed states: the system can then only exist in one of the allowed states and not in any other state.
The old quantum theory was instigated by the 1900 work of Max Planck on the emission and absorption of light in a black body with his discovery of Planck’s law introducing his quantum of action, and began in earnest after the work of Albert Einstein on the specific heats of solids in 1907 brought him to the attention of Walther Nernst. Einstein, followed by Debye, applied quantum principles to the motion of atoms, explaining the specific heat anomaly.
In 1910, Arthur Erich Haas develops J. J. Thomson’s atomic model in his 1910 paper that outlined a treatment of the hydrogen atom involving quantization of electronic orbitals, thus anticipating the Bohr model (1913) by three years.
John William Nicholson is noted as the first to create an atomic model that quantized angular momentum as h/2π. Niels Bohr quoted him in his 1913 paper of the Bohr model of the atom.
In 1913, Niels Bohr displayed rudiments of the later defined correspondence principle and used it to formulate a model of the hydrogen atom which explained the line spectrum. In the next few years Arnold Sommerfeld extended the quantum rule to arbitrary integrable systems making use of the principle of adiabatic invariance of the quantum numbers introduced by Lorentz and Einstein.
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