An aton can be thought of as a spherically symmeric box for electrons, where the walls of the box are set by die attraction of the elections to the positively charged nucleus. The energy-level structure of electrons in these atomic boxes have been a central testing ground of quantum mechanics. For example, reproducing the measured hydrogenic spectrum of the one-electron atom was one of the first tests of the Schrodinger equation. Similarly, the excitation spectra of multielectron atoms have been keyto the development of many of the more advanced ideas in multiparticle quantum mechanics. Now, similar experiments are being done on quantum dots (1).
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