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Published January 1, 1959 | public
Journal Article Open

Nuclear structure correction to the hyperfine structure in hydrogen

Abstract

In previous papers, corrections to the hyperfine structure (hfs) in hydrogen of relative order αm / M have been calculated by treating the proton as a point particle with an anomalous magnetic moment in addition to its Dirac moment. In this paper the proton is treated as a particle with structure by making use of the high-energy electron-proton-scattering data. Corrections of the previous work in which only a point particle was considered are calculated by using the Feynman formulation of quantum electrodynamics. It is also shown that exactly the same terms may be obtained by using the covariant Bethe-Salpeter equation. The calculated shift of -35 parts per million (including the "recoil corrections") is not in agreement with the combined results of several experiments (-1.4±18 parts per million). A possible source of this difference is meson corrections to a two-photon form-factor which is taken here as the product of two (Hofstadter) single-photon form-factors.

Additional Information

©1959 The American Physical Society. Received 11 September 1958. We would like to thank Professor Feynman for suggesting this problem and for his continued encouragement and help during the course of the computation. [C.K.I. was a] National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. [P.M.P. was a] Howard Hughes Fellow.

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August 21, 2023
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October 16, 2023