The CREMA collaboration is pursuing a measurement of the ground-state hyperfine splitting (HFS) in muonic hydrogen (μp) with 1 ppm accuracy by means of pulsed laser spectroscopy. In the proposed experiment, the μp atom is excited by a laser pulse from the singlet to the triplet hyperfine sub-levels, and is quenched back to the singlet state by an inelastic collision with a H2 molecule. The resulting increase of...
The energy levels of hydrogen-like atomic systems can be calculated with great precision. Starting from their quantum mechanical solution, they have been refined over the years to include the electron spin, the relativistic and quantum field effects, and tiny energy shifts related to the complex structure of the nucleus. These energy shifts caused by the nuclear structure are vastly magnified in hydrogen-like s...