Quasimolecular treatment of Stark broadening in hydrogen

Abstract

The recently developed unified Franck–Condon (UFC) treatment of pressure broadening of spectral lines is applied to Stark-broadened hydrogen lines to determine the profile at intermediate frequencies where both impact and quasistatic treatments are expected to fail. In the JWKB approximation the UFC lineshape is given by an analytic expression, the classical limit of which is a generalization of results obtained by the Green-function and phase-shift methods.