Subject: Aufbau irregularities

From: Allen Adler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 01:59:29 -0500

As one progresses through the elements by atomic number, the
pattern by which the electronic shells get filled is fairly
regular, but there are a few elements displaying irregularities,
e.g. those marked by an asterisk in the table on p.B-1 of my issue
of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

I imagine that these irregularities have been the object of a lot of
study, particularly in computational chemistry. So what I would like to
know is:
(1) have these irregularities been independently confirmed by
    ab initio computations?
(2) Apart from a brute force computation, have heuristic reasons been
    given why the Schrodinger (or whatever) equation should give rise
    to these anomalies?
(3) I know that different isotopes of an element are supposed to have
    the same chemical properties; but the atomic mass does appear in
    the Schrodinger equation, so it is conveivable that by choosing a
    suitable isotope for each element, one can obtain a table of electronic
    configurations in which no irregularities appear. Has this been observed
    or calculated?
(4) Assuming the premise of (3) is correct, is there a table of the
    electronic configurations of all of the isotopes?

Naively,
Allan Adler
[email-masked]