Atomic H over a Plane: The Soaring Effect

Abstract

The behavior of atomic hydrogen in a half-space with the third type (or Robin) boundary condition for the electronic wavefunction is considered. It is shown that for certain parameters of the boundary condition, the effective potential of such an atom as a function of the distance between the nucleus and the boundary has a pronounced minimum at finite distances, which corresponds to the effect of the atom “soaring” over the plane. For the general case of Robin boundary conditions, both the results of variational estimates based on the choice of special trial functions and the results of numerical calculations are given. For the particular Dirichlet and Neumann cases, the research is carried out using analytical methods.