Horace
> Today I learned an interesting factoid in passing: the internal > magnetic field for the sodium atom has been measured to be on the > order of ~30 MG (million Gauss) = ~3,000 T !! "This is not a large value for near nucleus field strength. The dipole field has a ~ 1/r^3 field intensity, so grows arbitrarily large as the the dipole distance r goes to zero." But it would seem that r cannot ever go to zero or near zero for measurement purposes - because of the strong force, which would overwhelm any other force long before it could attain that kind of value. The strong interaction is typically 100 times the strength of the electromagnetic force and I am assuming that the range for this measurement was outside the region where there would be interference. It is not clear how the measurement was made, but it was probably by deflection of an electron beam. When you say that this 30 T is not a large value, do you have a reference for that ? or are you basing the conclusion of the "arbitrarily large" supposition? Jones
