In atomic physics, the Bohr magneton (symbol μB) is a physical constant and the natural unit for expressing the magnetic moment of an electron caused by either its orbital or spin angular momentum.
The Bohr magneton is defined in SI units by
and in Gaussian CGS units by
where
e is the elementary charge, ħ is the reduced Planck constant, me is the electron rest mass and c is the speed of light.The electron magnetic moment, which is the electron's intrinsic spin magnetic moment, is approximately one Bohr magneton.
In general, and without reference to the electron's properties, the Bohr magneton may also be defined as
in Gaussian CGS units, where q is any charge and mq is its mass.
History
The idea of elementary magnets is due to Walther Ritz (1907) and Pierre Weiss. Already before the Rutherford model of atomic structure, several theorists commented that the magneton should involve Planck's constant h. By postulating that the ratio of electron kinetic energy to orbital frequency should be equal to h, Richard Gans computed a value that was twice as large as the Bohr magneton in September 1911. At the First Solvay Conference in November that year, Paul Langevin obtained a submultiple. The Romanian physicist Ștefan Procopiu had obtained the expression for the magnetic moment of the electron in 1911. The value is sometimes referred to as the "Bohr–Procopiu magneton" in Romanian scientific literature.
The Bohr magneton is the magnitude of the magnetic dipole moment of an orbiting electron with an orbital angular momentum of ħ. According to the Bohr model, this is the ground state, i.e. the state of lowest possible energy. In the summer of 1913, this value was naturally obtained by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr as a consequence of his atom model. In 1920, Wolfgang Pauli gave the Bohr magneton its name in an article where he contrasted it with the magneton of the experimentalists which he called the Weiss magneton.
Although the spin angular momentum of an electron is 1/2ħ, the intrinsic magnetic moment of the electron caused by its spin is still approximately one Bohr magneton. The electron spin g-factor is approximately two.