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by lukko 780 days ago
Hmm, why does the hydrogen atom look like a d orbital?

Isn't it 1s1 in the ground state so the probability distribution would look like a sphere.

1 comments

I assume it's just mislabeled, it's a high-angular-momentum hydrogenic orbital, chosen because it looks cool and because it's trivial to evaluate (a spherical harmonic times a simple radial term).