Progress in helium fine-structure calculations and the fine-structure constant
- 1 November 2002
- journal article
- Published by Canadian Science Publishing in Canadian Journal of Physics
- Vol. 80 (11) , 1195-1212
- https://doi.org/10.1139/p02-111
Abstract
The long-term goal of this work is to determine the fine-structure constant α from a comparison between theory and experiment for the fine-structure splittings of the helium 1s2p 3PJ states. All known terms of order α5 a.u. (α7 mc2) arising from the electron–electron interaction, and recoil corrections of order α4 µ / M a.u. are evaluated and added to previous tabulation. The predicted energy splittings are ν0,1 = 29 616.946 42(18) MHz and ν1,2 = 2291.154 62(31) MHz. Although the computational uncertainty is much less than ±1 kHz, there is an unexplained discrepancy between theory and experiment of 19.4(1.4) kHz for ν1,2. PACS Nos.: 31.30Jv, 32.10FnKeywords
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