Atticus Rare Books

The Theory of Complex Spectra, The Physical Review 34, 10, November 15, 1929, pp. 1293-1322 [FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE INTRODUCTION OF SLATER DETERMINANTS. FINE CONDITION]

Slater, J. C. [John Clarke]

FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE INTRODUCTION OF SLATER DETERMINANTS, now universally named for him and still employed. Many consider this Slater’s greatest paper.

Working at Harvard, the physicist John Clarke Slater “published the construction as an answer to the complicated group theoretical constructions for anti-symmetric wave functions that had been introduced by Hermann Weyl and Eugene Wigner in the 1920s” (The Citizen’s Compendium). The construction Slater created produced the determinantal expression for an anti-symmetric wave function.

A Slater determinant, then, is a simple and approximate expression for a wave function of a multi-fermion system – usually one that is a multi-electron system. It “automatically satisfy[ies] the requirements of the exclusion principle, including spin” and is of help in illustrating important properties of a many-particle wave-function (The Physical Review, The First Hundred Years, 86). Put another way: Constructed from a single spin-orbital product – an independent particle wave function – a Slater determinant is the simplest possible construction of a wave function that satisfies the Pauli principle -- an anti-symmetric wave function.

“Heisenberg and Dirac had independently shown that the complete wave function, inclusive of spin factors, must be anti-symmetric if both spin and orbit are permuted, and Pauli had shown how to interpret spin in terms of a factor in the wave function which had only two values. However no one had proposed constructing in explicit detail a determinant whose individual entries included the Pauli spin factor…

“In this [paper] Slater also introduced the so-called Slater F and G parameters, integrals describing the energies of all the states arising from a given configuration as long as inter-configuration interaction is neglected” (Morse, John Clarke Slater 1900-1976). Item #664

CONDITION & DETAILS: Original wraps. The American Physical Society. 4to. (10.25 x 7; 256 x 175mm). Very slight edge wear to the wraps; two small spots on front wrap. Otherwise fine. Bright and clean throughout.

Price: $200.00