Recoil corrections with finite nuclear size in hydrogenic systems
Abstract
Formulas for the combined nuclear-recoil and finite-nuclear-size effects of order and are derived without any expansion in the nuclear charge radius , making them applicable to both electronic and muonic atoms. The obtained results are particularly relevant for high-precision determinations of root-mean-square charge radii from muonic atom spectroscopy. We demonstrate that calculations of the atomic isotope shift based on the widely used Breit approximation give rise to an unphysical nuclear-size contribution that is linear in the nuclear charge radius at order . This spurious term vanishes in a full QED treatment, leaving the correct contribution quadratic in . For electronic atoms, this quadratic term is significantly smaller than the spurious linear contribution.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.09455,
title = {Recoil corrections with finite nuclear size in hydrogenic systems},
author = {Krzysztof Pachucki and Vojtěch Patkóš and Vladimir A. Yerokhin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09455},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
14 pages, 2 figures