High resolution spectroscopy of the hydrogen atom. II. Study of line profiles

Abstract
As second part of the detailed description of our recent work on the Rydberg constant measurement, here (paper II) we present our calculations of the line profiles of the hydrogen 2S-nS and 2S-nD Doppler-free two-photon signals observed in our experiment. Various broadening and shift effects have been considered and detailed calculations of the two-photon transition probability and of the light-shift have been done. The contributions of all possible trajectories of the atoms in the metastable beam have been summed to get the detected signal. The fit of each observed line with the corresponding calculated profile provides the line position with a relative accuracy of a few parts in 1011