Effects of Spiralling Trajectories on White Dwarf Spectra: High Rydberg States

Abstract

It has been recently suggested that white dwarf diagnostics could be in error and should be revised because of the effect of the magnetic field on spiralling trajectories of the plasma particles (mainly electrons), predicting a dramatic width increase for high densities of Balmer-β and especially for the δ and ϵ lines. These suggestions overlook important physics and are shown here to be incorrect. Specifically, exact calculations are carried out that can assess the importance of various physical effects neglected in the erroneous analysis mentioned. The net result of accounting for spiralling electron trajectories is typically a small to modest reduction in the line widths, at least for the parameters considered.

Keywords

• Stark broadening
• external magnetic field
• quadratic Zeeman effect
• line narrowing