Abstract
IN two letters in NATURE recently1, Dr. L. Tonks has expressed disagreement with the use of the Lorentz formula relating the ionisation density N and refractive index of an ionised medium for waves of frequency p/2. In the second of these letters, he refers to some work of mine2 in which this formula was derived ab initio (not by Lorentz's method as he suggests, but by a method which avoids some of the difficulties of applying Lorentz's argument directly to an ionised medium), and he suggests that this derivation is in error on account of the omission of a contribution to the field acting on an electron of the medium, and further that the inclusion of the omitted contribution reduces the dispersion formula to the Sellmeyer form 21+
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References
L. Tonks, NATURE, 132, 101, July 15, and 710, Nov. 4, 1933.
D. R. Hartree, Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 25, 97; 1929: 27, 143; 1931.
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HARTREE, D. The Dispersion Formula for an Ionised Medium. Nature 132, 929–930 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132929a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132929a0
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