English

Muonic hydrogen and the proton size

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2018-07-11 v3 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We reexamine the structure of the n=2n=2 levels of muonic hydrogen using a two-body potential that includes all relativistic, recoil and one loop corrections. The potential was originally derived from QED to describe the muonium atom and accounts for all contributions to order α5\alpha^5. Since one loop corrections are included, the anomalous magnetic moment contributions of the muon can be identified and replaced by the proton anomalous magnetic moment to describe muonic hydrogen with a point-like proton. This serves as a convenient starting point to include the dominant electron vacuum polarization corrections to the spectrum and extract the proton's mean squared radius rp=r2r_p=\sqrt{\langle r^2\rangle}. Our results are consistent with other theoretical calculations that find that the muonic hydrogen value for rpr_p is smaller than the result obtained from electron scattering.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.07440,
  title  = {Muonic hydrogen and the proton size},
  author = {Wayne W. Repko and Duane A. Dicus},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.07440},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

18 pages, 2 Tables, content added

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:50:59.625Z