Point of Interest John Clarke Slater

On December 22,1900, John Qarke Slater was born in Oak Park, Illinois. At the time, his father, John Rothwell Slater, was a graduate student at the University of Chicago- In 1904, the family moved to Rochester, New York, where his father had been appointed to the English department at the University of Rochester. 

Slater had an early interest in mathematics, architecture, and electrical devices. His scientific interests were strongly encouraged at home. When it came time for college, he chose 

With a traveling fellowship awarded by Harvard, Slater spent his first postdoctoral year at Cambridge. There, he developed a theory on radiative transitions in atoms. On discussing this idea with Neils Bohr and Hans Kramers, a joint paper on the quantum theory of radiation was published in 1924. However, Bohr and Kramers altered Slater s original idea by ascribing a virtual existence to the photons in the transitions— not the real photons that Slater believed in. In early 1925, Slater was back at Harvard and published further work of his own on radiative transitions. He presented a picture of absorption and emission of real photons coupled with energy conservation in transition processes. He also established a relationship between the width of spectral lines and the lifetimes of states. 

In 1926, he began studying radiative transitions in Hj, and in so doing, he examined Heisenberg s ideas of symmetric and antisymmetric two-electron states in helium. When Douglas Hartree introduced the self-consistent field method for the electronic structure of atoms in 1928, Slater saw the connection with Heisenberg s two-electron states. Slater published a major paper the next year. It described a theory of complex spectra, and in it he showed that with a determinantal many-electron wavefunction (the Slater determinant) one could achieve a self-consistent field wavefunction and also have the proper symmetry for electron systems (antisymmetric with respect to particle exchange). 

Find the energy of the n = l state of the hydrogen atom if the proton mass is infinite. 

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