Alkali rare-gas line profiles in a square-well potential approximation: Width,shift, and asymmetry

We have studied the profiles of spectral lines of alkalies perturbed by rare gases using the Anderson and Talman theory of line broadening with a square-well potential, chosen for its simplicity in order to understand the influence of potential parameters on the profiles. Although it is obvious that such a simple potential is not able to give an exact quantitative fit to the experimentally measured results, we have been able to give a complete and satisfactory explanation of the variations of width, shift and asymmetry with density by applying previously established results, for the case of well-resolved satellites, to the case of unresolved satellites often encountered experimentally.