Doing Away with Occupation Probability: A New Way to Model Continuum Lowering at White Dwarf Photosphere Conditions
Abstract
White dwarfs are interesting for a number of applications including studying equations of state, stellar pulsations, and determining the age of the universe.These interesting applications require accurate determination of surface conditions: temperatures and surface gravity (or mass).The most common technique to estimate the temperature and gravity is to find the model spectrun that best fits the observed spectra of a star (known as the spectroscopic method); however, this model rests on our ability to accurately model the hydrogen spectrum at high densities.There are currently disagreements between the spectroscopic method and other techniques to determine mass.We seek to resolve this issue by exploring the continuum lowering (or disappearance of states) of the hydrogen atom.The current formalism, called "occupation probability," defines some criteria for the isolated atom's bound state to be ionized, then extrapolates the continuous spectrum to the same energy threshold.The two are then combined to create the final cross-section.I introduce a new way of calculating the atomic spectrum by doing some averaging of the plasma interaction potential energy (previously used in the physics community) and directly integrating the Schrodinger equation.This technique is a major improvement over the Taylor expansion used to describe the ion-emitter interaction and removes the need of the occupation probability and treats continuum states and discrete states on the same footing in the spectrum calculation.The resulting energy spectrum is in fact many discrete states that when averaged over the electric field distribution in the plasma appears to be a continuum.In the low density limit, the two methods are in agreement, but show some differences at high densities (above 10$^{17} e/cc$) including line shifts near the ``continuum'' edge.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #227
- Pub Date:
- January 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AAS...22743402G