Theoretical interpretation of the vacuum ultraviolet reflectance of liquid helium and of the absorption spectra of helium microbubbles in aluminum

The position and width of the helium resonance line 1S012P11 are calculated for a high-density helium fluid. The theory aims at understanding the reflectivity data of Surko et al. for the low-temperature liquid-vapor interface and the absorption data of Rife et al. for room-temperature, high-pressure helium bubbles in aluminum. The theoretical ingredients of the model are (i) the long-range dipole interaction of an excited 2P atom with the rest of the fluid and with the metal substrate; (ii) the short-range Pauli pseudorepulsion arising from orthogonalization of the 2p-electron wave function with the 1s ground-state orbital of neighboring atoms; (iii) a statistical treatment of the high-density fluid based either on the experimentally measured radial pair distribution function of low-T liquid He, or on the Percus-Yevick distribution function of hard spheres and the theoretical equation of state of Young et al. for the He fluid in the bubbles; (iv) the standard static line-broadening theory to calculate the effect of Pauli repulsion on the line shapes. The theory provides a reasonably accurate understanding of the observed spectra in both the liquid and high-density gas, and can serve as a sound basis for interpretation of vacuum ultraviolet spectra in other gas-metal combinations.