The Zeeman effect (/'zeIm@n/; Dutch pronunciation: ['ze:man]), named after the Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman, is the effect of splitting a spectral line into several components in the presence of a static magnetic field. It is analogous to the Stark effect, the splitting of a spectral line into several components in the presence of an electric field. Also similar to the Stark effect, transitions between different components have, in general, different intensities, with some being entirely forbidden (in the dipole approximation), as governed by the selection rules.
Since the distance between the Zeeman sub-levels is a function of the magnetic field, this effect can be used to measure the magnetic field, e.g. that of the Sun and other stars or in laboratory plasmas. The Zeeman effect is very important in applications such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, electron spin resonance spectroscopy, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and Mossbauer spectroscopy. It may also be utilized to improve accuracy in atomic absorption spectroscopy. A theory about the magnetic sense of birds assumes that a protein in the retina is changed due to the Zeeman effect.
When the spectral lines are absorption lines, the effect is called inverse Zeeman effect.


== Nomenclature ==
Historically, one distinguishes between the normal and an anomalous Zeeman effect that appears on transitions where the net spin of the electrons is not 0, the number of Zeeman sub-levels being even instead of odd if there is an uneven number of electrons involved. It was called "anomalous" because the electron spin had not yet been discovered, and so there was no good explanation for it at the time that Zeeman observed the effect.
At higher magnetic fields the effect ceases to be linear. At even higher field strength, when the strength of the external field is comparable to the strength of the atom's internal field, electron coupling is disturbed and the spectral lines rearrange. This is called the Paschen-Back effect.
In the modern scientific literature, these terms are rarely used, with a tendency to use just the "Zeeman effect".


== Theoretical presentation ==
The total Hamiltonian of an atom in a magnetic field is

where  is the unperturbed Hamiltonian of the atom, and  is perturbation due to the magnetic field:

where  is the magnetic moment of the atom. The magnetic moment consists of the electronic and nuclear parts; however, the latter is many orders of magnitude smaller and will be neglected here. Therefore,

where  is the Bohr magneton,  is the total electronic angular momentum, and  is the Lande g-factor. A more accurate approach is to take into account that the operator of the magnetic moment of an electron is a sum of the contributions of the orbital angular momentum  and the spin angular momentum , with each multiplied by the appropriate gyromagnetic ratio:

where  and  (the latter is called the anomalous gyromagnetic ratio; the deviation of the value from 2 is due to the effects of quantum electrodynamics). In the case of the LS coupling, one can sum over all electrons in the atom:

where  and  are the total orbital momentum and spin of the atom, and averaging is done over a state with a given value of the total angular momentum.
If the interaction term  is small (less than the fine structure), it can be treated as a perturbation; this is the Zeeman effect proper. In the Paschen-Back effect, described below,  exceeds the LS coupling significantly (but is still small compared to ). In ultrastrong magnetic fields, the magnetic-field interaction may exceed , in which case the atom can no longer exist in its normal meaning, and one talks about Landau levels instead. There are, of course, intermediate cases which are more complex than these limit cases.


== Weak field (Zeeman effect) ==
If the spin-orbit interaction dominates over the effect of the external magnetic field,  and  are not separately conserved, only the total angular momentum  is. The spin and orbital angular momentum vectors can be thought of as precessing about the (fixed) total angular momentum vector . The (time-)"averaged" spin vector is then the projection of the spin onto the direction of :

and for the (time-)"averaged" orbital vector:

Thus,

Using  and squaring both sides, we get

and: using  and squaring both sides, we get

Combining everything and taking , we obtain the magnetic potential energy of the atom in the applied external magnetic field,

where the quantity in square brackets is the Lande g-factor gJ of the atom ( and ) and  is the z-component of the total angular momentum. For a single electron above filled shells  and , the Lande g-factor can be simplified into:


=== Example: Lyman alpha transition in hydrogen ===
The Lyman alpha transition in hydrogen in the presence of the spin-orbit interaction involves the transitions
 and 
In the presence of an external magnetic field, the weak-field Zeeman effect splits the 1S1/2 and 2P1/2 levels into 2 states each () and the 2P3/2 level into 4 states (). The Lande g-factors for the three levels are:
 for  (j=1/2, l=0)
 for  (j=1/2, l=1)
 for  (j=3/2, l=1).
Note in particular that the size of the energy splitting is different for the different orbitals, because the gJ values are different. On the left, fine structure splitting is depicted. This splitting occurs even in the absence of a magnetic field, as it is due to spin-orbit coupling. Depicted on the right is the additional Zeeman splitting, which occurs in the presence of magnetic fields.


== Strong field (Paschen-Back effect) ==
The Paschen-Back effect is the splitting of atomic energy levels in the presence of a strong magnetic field. This occurs when an external magnetic field is sufficiently large to disrupt the coupling between orbital () and spin () angular momenta. This effect is the strong-field limit of the Zeeman effect. When , the two effects are equivalent. The effect was named after the German physicists Friedrich Paschen and Ernst E. A. Back.
When the magnetic-field perturbation significantly exceeds the spin-orbit interaction, one can safely assume . This allows the expectation values of  and  to be easily evaluated for a state . The energies are simply

The above may be read as implying that the LS-coupling is completely broken by the external field. However  and  are still "good" quantum numbers. Together with the selection rules for an electric dipole transition, i.e.,  this allows to ignore the spin degree of freedom altogether. As a result, only three spectral lines will be visible, corresponding to the  selection rule. The splitting  is independent of the unperturbed energies and electronic configurations of the levels being considered. It should be noted that in general (if ), these three components are actually groups of several transitions each, due to the residual spin-orbit coupling.
In general, one must now add spin-orbit coupling and relativistic corrections (which are of the same order, known as 'fine structure') as a perturbation to these 'unperturbed' levels. First order perturbation theory with these fine-structure corrections yields the following formula for the Hydrogen atom in the Paschen-Back limit:


== Intermediate field for j = 1/2 ==
In the magnetic dipole approximation, the Hamiltonian which includes both the hyperfine and Zeeman interactions is

To arrive at the Breit-Rabi formula we will include the hyperfine structure (interaction between the electron's spin and the magnetic moment of the nucleus), which is governed by the quantum number , where  is the spin angular momentum operator of the nucleus. Alternatively, the derivation could be done with  only. The constant  is known as the zero field hyperfine constant and is given in units of Hertz.  is the Bohr magneton.  and  are the electron and nuclear angular momentum operators.  and  can be found via a classical vector coupling model or a more detailed quantum mechanical calculation to be:

As discussed, in the case of weak magnetic fields, the Zeeman interaction can be treated as a perturbation to the  basis. In the high field regime, the magnetic field becomes so large that the Zeeman effect will dominate, and we must use a more complete basis of  or just  since  and  will be constant within a given level.
To get the complete picture, including intermediate field strengths, we must consider eigenstates which are superpositions of the  and  basis states. For , the Hamiltonian can be solved analytically, resulting in the Breit-Rabi formula. Notably, the electric quadrapole interaction is zero for  (), so this formula is fairly accurate.
To solve this system, we note that at all times, the total angular momentum projection  will be conserved. Furthermore, since  between states  will change between only . Therefore, we can define a good basis as:

We now utilize quantum mechanical ladder operators, which are defined for a general angular momentum operator  as

These ladder operators have the property

as long as  lies in the range  (otherwise, they return zero). Using ladder operators  and  We can rewrite the Hamiltonian as

Now we can determine the matrix elements of the Hamiltonian:

Solving for the eigenvalues of this matrix, (as can be done by hand, or more easily, with a computer algebra system) we arrive at the energy shifts:

where  is the splitting (in units of Hz) between two hyperfine sublevels in the absence of magnetic field ,
 is referred to as the 'field strength parameter' (Note: for  the square root is an exact square, and should be interpreted as ). This equation is known as the Breit-Rabi formula and is useful for systems with one valence electron in an  () level.
Note that index  in  should be considered not as total angular momentum of the atom but as asymptotic total angular momentum. It is equal to total angular momentum only if  otherwise eigenvectors corresponding different eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian are the superpositions of states with different  but equal  (the only exceptions are ).


== Applications ==


=== Astrophysics ===

George Ellery Hale was the first to notice the Zeeman effect in the solar spectra, indicating the existence of strong magnetic fields in sunspots. Such fields can be quite high, on the order of 0.1 tesla or higher. Today, the Zeeman effect is used to produce magnetograms showing the variation of magnetic field on the sun.


=== Laser cooling ===
The Zeeman effect is utilized in many laser cooling applications such as a magneto-optical trap and the Zeeman slower.


== See also ==
Magneto-optic Kerr effect
Voigt effect
Faraday effect
Cotton-Mouton effect
Polarization spectroscopy
Zeeman energy
Lamb shift
Electron configuration says at subshell p (l=1), there are 3 energy level ml=-1,0,1, but we see only two p1/2 and p3/2. for subshell s(l=0), there is only 1 energy level (ml=0), but here we have 2. l corresponding to fine structure, ml corresponding to hyperfine structure.


== References ==


=== Historical ===
Condon, E. U.; G. H. Shortley (1935). The Theory of Atomic Spectra. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-09209-4.  (Chapter 16 provides a comprehensive treatment, as of 1935.)
Zeeman, P. (1897). "On the influence of Magnetism on the Nature of the Light emitted by a Substance". Phil. Mag. 43: 226. 
Zeeman, P. (1897). "Doubles and triplets in the spectrum produced by external magnetic forces". Phil. Mag. 44 (266): 55. doi:10.1080/14786449708621028. 
Zeeman, P. (11 February 1897). "The Effect of Magnetisation on the Nature of Light Emitted by a Substance". Nature 55 (1424): 347. Bibcode:1897Natur..55..347Z. doi:10.1038/055347a0. 


=== Modern ===
Feynman, Richard P., Leighton, Robert B., Sands, Matthew (1965). The Feynman Lectures on Physics 3. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-02115-3. 
Forman, Paul (1970). "Alfred Lande and the anomalous Zeeman Effect, 1919-1921". Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 2: 153-261. doi:10.2307/27757307. 
Griffiths, David J. (2004). Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-805326-X. 
Liboff, Richard L. (2002). Introductory Quantum Mechanics. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-8053-8714-5. 
Sobelman, Igor I. (2006). Theory of Atomic Spectra. Alpha Science. ISBN 1-84265-203-6. 
Foot, C. J. (2005). Atomic Physics. ISBN 0-19-850696-1. 


== External links ==
Zeeman Effect Apparatus Manufacturer