Penetrating collisions in hydrogen spectral line broadening by plasmas

Spectral line Stark broadening calculations in the “standard theory” typically retain only the long-ranged dipole term in the interaction between the perturbing plasma and emitting or absorbing atom. Thus, penetrating collisions as well as higher multipoles are neglected. The full Coulomb interaction is applied to hydrogen lines using a quantum mechanical treatment. It is found that the line widths from the quantum mechanical approach moderately disagree with earlier semi-classical treatment of penetrating collisions.