Atomic Dipoles

So here I am, writing again, trying to think what to say in order to meet the high expectancies I build in the first post (Big mistake). I kinda explicitly said that I fin all of the ideas interesting, and that is true, the thing is, I kinda wanted to imply, that they may not seem so cool to you.....but WTF, since nobody read this, I will give it a shot...

Last week, during the visit of the Colombian ambassador in Prague, about 30 Colombian fellows gathered after the meeting and went together for a beer in Strahovsky Klaster (very nice place btw). During the conversation, somebody mention one of Colombian typical 'sports', Tejo. We were discussing how there are world championships of such discipline (If it is a discipline at all...) and teams from different countries get drunk while trying to explode gunpowder bags located about 20 mts away swinging through the air metallic discs. But that is the OK part of it. After a while, people stared confessing how bad they are at Tejo, how they have blown up the roof of the place, how professionals attach their own disk to their belts using a powerful magnet, or how foreigns thought somebody called ''mecha'' has died of a gunshot (my favorite..).

Between laughs I kept thinking about that little magnet. And apparently the players not only use it as an easy way to store their precious discs while not playing (Or a way to wake up hangover and still have it with them), but apparently they put the magnet so somehow the metallic disc will gain an extra symmetrical property (placing the magnet concentric with the disc) thus allowing better performances. As the only guy who liked physics in there, it was my responsibility to clarify things, so I explained how most of the day to day metals, interact with magnetic fields in the atomic scale aligning their little magnetic dipoles as a response to the external field, creating then, their own magnetic field. I tried to make clear that as soon as the external field will disappear, the magnetization of the disc will also disappear, and therefore the expected extra symmetrical property. In the best of the cases, regions with different magnetization will appear, but still, the symmetry will disappear....It felt nice.

During the next day or two, I kept thinking about the argument I used, about how the little dipoles tend to align in an external magnetic field, and so on. I start remembering the dusty ideas from QM about the exited states of the atoms, Spherical Harmonics, the Bose-Einstein condensate....and then the idea strike me.

Imagine a molecule at room temperature. The molecule will be jumping from one exited state to another, and the different energies will loose importance when they are averaged over time or over the ensemble. However as we lower the temperature the states will start ''jumping down'' the energy scale.  Low enough to appreciate the effect of the polarization created by the electron cloud itself (since the Spherical Harmonics are not symmetrical in the polar coordinate). I mean, there will be no need of an external field to create such polarization.

It may seem very obvious just by looking at the first spherical harmonics. But I guess I have never realized that. I wonder if there is any way to measure that little polarization...I mean, is not like I cant think about one, but rather,have anybody done it? I know you can calculate it doing integrals over the wave function and so on. But..like always...just wondering......just wondering.