Physnews had a story once why electrons orbiting atomic nucleus do not radiate themselves to death.
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Do someone here know anything more about this. If this is true this quite important IMO. Allthough I don't understand what is "a toroidal dipole (associated with poloidal current configuration)". But if I Google "poloidal current configuration" and so on, I seem to get more of the same story. So perhaps there is some truth in this.
By the way, I posted this first to phys newsgroup but got no answers, perhaps they have their own crazy ideas.
Phys news is 1/2 a crock/ sensationalist QM explains just fine why the atom is stable. The planetary model of the atom is kinda a nice picture but it's not at all valid. I could go on about uncertainty relations and a particle in a box... but you can read in any QM text about that. I will add that the lowest electron energy state in an atom has no angular momentum.. not even the hint of an 'orbit'.
(I didn't read much in the article so I have no idea about the toroidal dipole.)
It might be headlined that way but it is more about making things appear to vanish and metamaterials.
Toroidal dipoles were first examined by Zel'dovcih in 1958 and may play a part in important physics. I doubt that you can conjure an atom structure up that uses them to prevent atoms radiation losses though since whereas electric dipole radiate like w^4 these radiate like w^6.
I guess you could conjure up a classical system that was able to suppress a single emission line. It would be interesting to know if the classical electron time spent as a function of radius tends towards the probability distribution of quantum mechanics. QED is a very complete theory so even if this did make a new classical style approach possible it is never going to be elegant enough to supplant quantum mechanics.
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Looks to be a half reasonable technical paper for anyone interested in a bit more of the detail. It isn't an easy read. Sorry about that.
They are becoming sexy again now because of metamaterials, terahertz imaging and the wish to make ever better cloaks of invisibility. It is a refinement to the multipole approximations used for Mie scattering.
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