Hydrogen photoionization in a magnetized medium: the rigid-wavefunction approach revisited

Abstract

Realistic modeling of stellar spectra requires accurate radiative opacity coefficients. Owing to the fragmentary nature of existing data from rigorous quantum-mechanical calculations, photoionization coefficients based on the rigid-wavefunction approximation remain the only practical option for studies of magnetic white dwarfs. Although variants of this approach have been widely used in spectral analyses for decades, a complete and explicit treatment of degeneracy-level breaking has not previously been presented. In this work, we provide a comprehensive description of this procedure, including explicit expressions for the photoionization probability of individual bound-free transitions as functions of magnetic field strength and radiation polarization. We also evaluate the occupation numbers of bound states in a magnetized gas under ionization equilibrium, enabling the calculation of absolute photoionization opacities. Because high-lying atomic states are strongly perturbed by the magnetic field and ultimately dissolved, substantial modifications of the monochromatic absorption are found even for fields below 10 MG--a regime where fully rigorous quantum calculations are numerically demanding and have not yet been applied. Over a wide range of magnetic field strengths, pronounced dichroic features appear in the hydrogen continuum absorption.