Hydrogen Atoms under Magnification: Direct Observation of…
★★★★☆ 4.0 — Peer reviewed, Physical Review Letters
★★★★☆ 4.0 / 5 — Peer reviewed, Physical Review Letters
Hydrogen Atoms under Magnification: Direct Observation of the Nodal Structure of Stark States
Aneta S. Stodolna et al. · 2013 · Physical Review Letters · article
Why this rating
- Evidence class: article (3.00)
- Cited 7.7x the average for its field and age (+0.50)
- Top 10% most-cited in its field (+0.50)
- Open access: the full text is checkable (+0.25)
The rubric starts from what kind of study this is and lets citation data adjust it, never the other way round. Five stars is reachable by a well-regarded evidence synthesis and not by a single paper, however famous. Scores round down.
How the field treats it
145 citations recorded.
Field-weighted citation impact: 7.68. This is the count normalised against papers of the same age in the same field, where 1.00 is exactly average — it is the number worth reading, because a raw count means something different in oncology than in topology.
In the top 10% most-cited work in its field.
What stands against it
No retraction, correction or expression of concern on record.
No published comment, reply or rebuttal naming it was found among the works that cite it.
Data-integrity concerns often surface first on PubPeer, which cannot be read automatically: see its discussion there.
Notices from Crossref, which carries the Retraction Watch database; replies from OpenAlex.
What it actually says
To describe the microscopic properties of matter, quantum mechanics uses wave functions, whose structure and time dependence is governed by the Schrödinger equation. In atoms the charge distributions described by the wave function are rarely observed. The hydrogen atom is unique, since it only has one electron and, in a dc electric field, the Stark Hamiltonian is exactly separable in terms of parabolic coordinates (η, ξ, φ). As a result, the microscopic wave function along the ξ coordinate that exists in the vicinity of the atom, and the projection of the continuum wave function measured at a macroscopic distance, share the same nodal structure. In this Letter, we report photoionization microscopy experiments where this nodal structure is directly observed. The experiments provide a validation of theoretical predictions that have been made over the last three decades.
Read it
- Full text
- doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.110.213001
- OpenAlex record — the data this rating was computed from
This rates the paper, not the claim. A strong paper can still be irrelevant to, or misquoted by, the post that cited it. The stars say how much weight the study can bear — not whether it says what someone claimed it says.
Rubric v1.0 · data from OpenAlex, retrieved 19 Oct 2026