Hydrogen Stark Broadening by Model Electronic Microfields

The Method of Model Microfields proposed by Brissaud and Frisch is applied to calculate Stark broadened profiles of hydrogen lines in the static ion approximation. Numerical results for L-α, H-α, and H-β are found to be in good agreement with those derived from the unified theory by Vidal, Cooper, and Smith over a wide range of plasma densities and temperatures. This demon­ strates that reliable line profiles may be obtained from the microfield distribution and covariance alone, more complicated statistical features being less important in this context.