Related papers: The "Sommerfeld Puzzle" and Its Extensions
Probably the most dramatic historical challenge to scientific realism concerns Arnold Sommerfeld's 1916 derivation of the fine structure energy levels of hydrogen. Not only were his predictions good, he derived exactly the same formula that…
The recently introduced reconciliation of the theories of special relativity and wave mechanics implies that the mass-energy equivalence principle must be expressed mathematically as H = mv^2, where H is the total energy of a particle, m is…
The hydrogen atom is supposed to be described by a generalization of Schr\"{o}dinger equation, in which the Hamiltonian depends on an iterated Laplacian and a Coulomb-like potential $r^{-\beta}$. Starting from previously obtained solutions…
As a serious attempt for constructing a new foundation for describing micro-entities from a causal standpoint, it was explained before in [1, 2, 3] that by unifying the concepts of information, matter and energy, each micro-entity is…
For muonic hydrogen, positronium, and ordinary hydrogen, we show that the existence of a relativistic two-body wave equation whose energy levels are physically accurate to order $(Z\alpha )^4$ (where $Z\alpha$ is the binding coupling…
In 1905, Einstein formulated his special relativity for point particles. For those particles, his Lorentz covariance and energy-momentum relation are by now firmly established. How about the hydrogen atom? It is possible to perform Lorentz…
The concept of an all pervading Aether is age old, and contrary to popular belief, it survived the twentieth century too though with different nuances. Using this concept of a background Quantum Vacuum, the author in 1997 proposed a…
We consider a hydrogen atom in the background spacetimes generated by an infinitely thin cosmic string and by a point-like global monopole. In both cases, we find the solutions of the corresponding Dirac equations and we determine the…
We propose a new approach to calculate perturbatively the effects of a particular deformed Heisenberg algebra on energy spectrum. We use this method to calculate the harmonic oscillator spectrum and find that corrections are in agreement…
The results obtained by Pauli, in his 1926 article on the hydrogen atom, made essential use of the dynamical so(4) symmetry of the bound states. Pauli used this symmetry to compute the perturbed energy levels of an hydrogen atom in a…
The Born-Infeld form of the hydrogen atom has a spectrum that can be used to determine the physical viability of the theory, and place an experimentally relevant bound on the single parameter found in it. We compute this spectrum using the…
Heisenberg's breakthrough in his July 1925 paper that set in motion the development of Quantum Mechanics through subsequent papers by Born, Jordan, Heisenberg and also Dirac (from 1925 to 1927) is reexamined through a modern lens. In this…
In this paper we endeavour to determine the energy levels of an atom by virtue of the modified Dirac equation. It has been found that the energy levels contain an extra term in the expression which accounts for the {\it zitterbewegung}…
The Dirac equation for H$_2^+$ is solved numerically using an iterative method proposed by Kutzelnigg [Z. Phys. 11, 15 (1989]. The four-component wavefunction is expanded in a newly introduced kinetically balanced exponential basis set. The…
In 1919 A. Einstein suspected first that gravitational fields could play an essential role in the structure of elementary particles. In 1937, P.A.M. Dirac found a miraculous link between the properties of the visible Universe and elementary…
Thanks to the Dirac equation, the hydrogen-like atom at high $Z$ offers a precise model of relativistic bound state, allowing to test properties of unpolarized and polarized structure functions analogous to the hadronic ones, in particular:…
Historically, the eccentricity of Sommerfeld orbits from quantization conditions in either parabolic or spherical coordinates was found to differ in almost all cases. To do the orbit comparison correctly, one must use amended instead of…
In Phys. Rev. A 70, 032104 (2004), M. Montesinos and G. F. Torres del Castillo consider various symplectic structures on the classical phase space of the two-dimensional isotropic harmonic oscillator. Using Dirac's quantization condition,…
The Dirac equation offers a precise analytical description of relativistic two-particle bound states, when one of the constituent is very heavy and radiative corrections are neglected. Looking at the high-Z hydrogen-like atom in the…
In this article and beginning with the Dirac solution to the Hydrogen atom in its ground state, the exact results corresponding to the expectation value of the distance of the electron to the proton and the maximum probability distance are…