  It is perhaps appropriate that, in a year marking the 90th anniversary of
Meghnad Saha seminal paper (1920), new developments should call fresh attention
to the problem of ionization equilibrium in gases. Ionization equilibrium is
considered in the simplest "physical" model for an electronic subsystem of
matter in a rarefied state, consisting of one localized electronic state in
each nucleus and delocalized electronic states considered as free ones. It is
shown that, despite the qualitative agreement, there is a significant
quantitative difference from the results of applying the Saha formula to the
degree of ionization. This is caused by the fact that the Saha formula
corresponds to the "chemical" model of matter.
