What is Zeeman effect

Zeeman effect the splitting of the lines in a spectrum when the source of the spectrum is exposed to a magnetic field, it was discovered in 1896 by the dutch physicist pieter zeeman (1865-1943). In the normal zeeman effect a single line is split into three if the field is perpendicular to the light path or two lines if the field is parallel to the light path. This effect can be explained by classical electromagnetic principles in terms of the speeding up and slowing down of electrons in atoms due to the applied field and in terms of the old quantum theory of bohr and sommerfeld. The anomalous zeeman effect is a complicated splitting of the lines into several closely spaced lines, so called because it does not agree with classical predictions or the old quantum theory. This effect is explained by quantum mechanics in terms of electron spin.