Zeeman Effect - Nomenclature

Nomenclature

Historically, one distinguishes between the "normal" and an anomalous Zeeman effect that appears on transitions where the net spin of the electrons is not 0, the number of Zeeman sub-levels being even instead of odd if there's an uneven number of electrons involved. It was called "anomalous" because the electron spin had not yet been discovered, and so there was no good explanation for it at the time that Zeeman observed the effect.

At higher magnetic fields the effect ceases to be linear. At even higher field strength, when the strength of the external field is comparable to the strength of the atom's internal field, electron coupling is disturbed and the spectral lines rearrange. This is called the Paschen-Back effect.

In the modern scientific literature, these terms are rarely used, with a tendency to use just the "Zeeman effect".