Radio Recombination Lines: Their Physics and Astronomical Applications

This book is a comprehensive guide to the physics and observations of Radio Recombination Lines from astronomical sources, written for astronomers, physicists, and graduate students. It is suitable for a graduate-level textbook. It includes the history of RRL detections, the astrophysics underlying their intensities and line shapes including topics like departures from LTE and Stark broadening, the maximum possible size of an atom, as well as detailed descriptions of the astronomical topics f…