ABSTRACT
Up to this point, we have considered only the spectroscopy associated with tran-
sitions from states characterized by core electron wave functions to other states
that are equally well defined by different wave functions. This spectroscopy
description is appropriate as long as the quantum numbers of the terminal state
are relatively low in magnitude, but different phenomena become important
when the quantum numbers become sufficiently large. At high quantum
numbers, the energy spacings between higher excited states become successively
smaller until the states effectively merge into a continuum. In fact, when an
anharmonic potential energy term is used in the Hamiltonian operator, one
finds that at sufficiently high quantum numbers dissociation of an excited electron
may take place. This information is of great interest, because knowledge of the
energy required to dissociate an electron would be directly related to the
energy of the state from which it had been removed.
