Can you discover unknown elements by calculating their spectra?
Can you discover unknown elements by calculating their spectra?
Years ago I had a discussion with Saul Pwanson about the islands of stability and wondered, can I discover an unknown element by calculating its spectra and pointing a telescope at distant stars?
I asked some smart people I know and they said, ‘Yes and…’.
They said I’d need a basis set and a density function calibrated for those elements. They also said problem setup would be a large amount of work, and then a very large amount of CPU and memory to answer the problem.
They suggested I also look at the selection rule.
A related and disheartening discovery was the furious disagreements in publications titled Undecidability of the spectral gap. What’s up with that?
The math is beyond me, I wouldn’t even know where to start.
If the math isn’t beyond you, try it out and tell me how it goes?