ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we carry out in detail the program outlined at the beginning of Chapter 6. We concern ourselves with an atom which has an electron configuration distributed over several complete and one incomplete shell. (The assumption that the atom has only one incomplete shell is for notational convenience. The theory is readily extended to atoms with several incomplete shells. We shall work explicitly an example where the electrons lie in different incomplete shells,) The central field approximation provides several—say k— degenerate solutions corresponding to the several different ways the electrons in the incomplete shell can be distributed. Evidently, these degenerate solutions differ among themselves by the assignment of the mℓ and ms quantum numbers to the orbitals in the incomplete shell.
