Abstract
For a transition in a monatomic gas, it is shown that certain processes in which excitation is transferred from one atom to another lead to different resonance-broadened line shapes in emission and absorption. The absorption line shape is determined by an averaged diagonal matrix element of the resolvent operator (in the representation of the unperturbed states), while in emission some off-diagonal elements contribute. The differences are exhibited formally in terms of resolvent-operator theory, and also worked out explicitly for the case of pure impact broadening with the classical path approximation. In this case, the main effect is a shift of the emission line toward the red, relative to the absorption, by an amount of the same order of magnitude as the width. In the case where the lower level in emission is the one undergoing resonance broadening, the line shapes for emission and absorption (with the same final states) are the same.
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