Classical calculation of radiative decay rates of hydrogenic Stark states
Abstract
The Kepler-Coulomb problem is solved in parabolic coordinates and the Larmor radiation problem is analyzed to complement a previous study performed for the usual representation in spherical polar coordinates. A comparison with quantum spontaneous decay rates shows that for azimuthal quantum number m = 0 states only transitions to nearby n- n principal quantum number states are described properly by the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin quantized classical motions, but that for m > 0 reasonable results emerge for many values of n. A simple approximate expression for the lifetime of m 0 states emerges from the semi-classical analysis.
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