Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Cowan code: 50 years of growing impact on atomic physics

Published

Author(s)

Alexander Kramida

Abstract

The famous Cowan's book "The Theory of Atomic Structure and Spectra" published in 1981 and his suite of computer codes based on it continue to be highly influential in atomic physics and many other researchareas. As of September 2018, there are more than 5000 citations to Cowan's book and codes, and eachyear adds about 150 citations to this list. I will briefly describe what these codes do and why they areresponsible for most of the current progress in analyses of atomic spectra. Various modificationsof thesecodes, including my own, will also be described.
Citation
Atoms
Volume
7

Keywords

Atomic codes, atomic theory, Slater parameters, energy levels, least-squares fit

Citation

Kramida, A. (2019), Cowan code: 50 years of growing impact on atomic physics, Atoms, [online], https://doi.org/10.3390/atoms7030064, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=928134 (Accessed October 6, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created July 2, 2019, Updated April 30, 2021