English

Improved nuclear-structure corrections to the hyperfine splitting of electronic and muonic deuterium

Nuclear Theory 2025-08-27 v1 Atomic Physics

Abstract

We calculate the nuclear-structure correction to the hyperfine splitting in both electronic and muonic deuterium using interactions from chiral effective field theory. We explore the sensitivity to different parameterizations of the nucleon-nucleon force, study the convergence pattern in the order-by-order chiral expansion, and estimate remaining uncertainties. Our results are consistent with earlier calculations from pionless effective field theory, offering new insights for a robust uncertainty quantification. Thanks to the order-of-magnitude reduction in uncertainty achieved with chiral effective field theory, the two-photon exchange contribution in electronic deuterium agrees with experimental extractions within 0.7σ0.7\sigma, in contrast to the 2.7σ2.7\sigma discrepancy observed in muonic deuterium. This study lays the groundwork for extending TPE calculations to HFS in heavier atomic systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.18776,
  title  = {Improved nuclear-structure corrections to the hyperfine splitting of electronic and muonic deuterium},
  author = {Jose Bonilla and Thomas R. Richardson and Sonia Bacca and Chen Ji and Lucas Platter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.18776},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables