2015/06/30 by Pedro Amaro, B. Franke, Beatrice Franke +15 · 28 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Chemical Physics Studies #Atomic and Molecular Physics #Atomic physics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Deuterium #Electron #Exotic atom #Helium #Hydrogen #Hyperfine structure #Lamb shift #Laser #Laser linewidth #Nuclear physics #Photon #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Spectral line #Spectroscopy #Stark effect #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.92.022514
published in Physical Review A 92(2) (American Physical Society) · 8 pages, 4 Figs. Shorter version as recommended by the referee. More details can be found in v1
openalex publication_date 2015/08/28 · arxiv created 2015/08/29 · arxiv updated 2015/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Quantum interference between energetically close states is theoretically investigated, with the state structure being observed via laser spectroscopy. In this work, we focus on hyperfine states of selected hydrogenic muonic isotopes, and on how quantum interference affects the measured Lamb shift. The process of photon excitation and subsequent photon decay is implemented within the framework of nonrelativistic second-order perturbation theory. Due to its experimental interest, calculations are performed for muonic hydrogen, deuterium, and helium-3. We restrict our analysis to the case of photon scattering by incident linear polarized photons and the polarization of the scattered photons not being observed. We conclude that while quantum interference effects can be safely neglected in muonic hydrogen and helium-3, in the case of muonic deuterium there are resonances with close proximity, where quantum interference effects can induce shifts up to a few percent of the linewidth, assuming a pointlike detector. However, by taking into account the geometry of the setup used by the CREMA collaboration, this effect is reduced to less than 0.2% of the linewidth in all possible cases, which makes it irrelevant at the present level of accuracy.