On the Atomic Polarization of the Ground Level of Na I

Abstract

In a recent letter (Trujillo Bueno et al. 2002), we showed the remarkable result that the atomic alignment of the levels P${}_{1/2}$ and S${}_{1/2}$ of the D${}_1$ line of Na I is practically destroyed in the presence of magnetic fields sensibly larger than 10 G, irrespectively of the field direction. In this paper, we demonstrate analytically that this property is a consequence of the decoupling of the electronic and nuclear angular momenta, J and I, in the excited state P${}_{3/2}$, which is achieved when the Zeeman splitting from the local magnetic field becomes much larger than the typical hyperfine separation for that level.

The Astrophysical Journal; 2002; in press

References in corpus (1)

• The Physical Origin of the Scattering Polarization of the Na I D-Lines in the Presence of Weak Magnetic Fields

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