Teaching tips

If you want some new (and old) ideas to improve your teaching it is worth looking at McKeachie's teaching tips: strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers. The book is now in the 13th edition.

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What is Herzberg-Teller coupling?

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Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thrown around. Google scholar yields more than 3000 hits. But I have found its precise meaning and the relevant physics hard to pin down. Quantum mechanics in chemistry by Schatz and Ratner is an excellent book , but the discussion on page 204 did not help me. "Herzberg-Teller" never appears in Atkins' Molecular quantum mechanics. So here is my limited understanding. Herzberg and Teller wanted to understand why one observed certain vibronic (combined electronic and vibrational) transitions that were not expected, particularly some that were expected to be forbidden on symmetry grounds. " Intensity borrowing " occurred. Herzberg and Teller pointed out that his could be understood if the dipole transition moment for the electronic transition depended on the nuclear co-ordinate associated with the vibration. In the Franck-Condo
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Is it an Unidentified Superconducting Object (USO)?

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What should be the order of authors on a conference poster or talk?

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