Elsevier

Physics Letters A

Volume 172, Issue 4, 4 January 1993, Pages 277-280
Physics Letters A

Experimental method to measure the hyperfine splitting of muomic hydrogen (μ-p)1S

https://doi.org/10.1016/0375-9601(93)91021-VGet rights and content

Abstract

We propose an experimental method to measure the hyperfine splitting of the energy level of the muonic hydrogen ground state (μ-p)1S by inducing a laser-stimulated para-to-ortho transition. The method requires an intense low energy pulsed μ- beam and

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  • Excitation probability of the hyperfine ground state of Doppler-broadened muonic hydrogen through dipole-forbidden transition

    2020, Optik
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    An independent measurement for the hyperfine splitting (1S(F = 0 − F = 1)) of the ground state of muonic hydrogen can also serve as a pathway to accurately determine the proton size [10], since the hyperfine splitting is mathematically expressed as a sum of the pure QED correction and a term that describes the effects of proton structure [11,12]. In the experimental scheme originally proposed by Bakalov et al. [13], negative muons are slowed down and stopped in a pure hydrogen target between two parallel gold or aluminium plates to form muonic hydrogen. However, the measurement of the hyperfine splitting of the ground state of muonic hydrogen is not as easy as it sounds: Although the 1S(F = 0) − 1S(F = 1) transition of muonic hydrogen is large as mentioned above, and the transition wavelength is in the mid-infrared range (6.76 μm), this transition is dipole-forbidden, and we ought to employ the magnetic dipole transition which is several orders of magnitude weaker than the electric dipole transition.

  • Theoretical and computational study of the energy dependence of the muon transfer rate from hydrogen to higher-Z gases

    2015, Physics Letters, Section A: General, Atomic and Solid State Physics
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    This was interpreted as an evidence for a non-flat energy dependence of the muon transfer rate [11], and a step-function was introduced to describe qualitatively the energy dependence of the transfer rate to oxygen, argon and neon. The earlier estimates of the efficiency of the experimental method in [1,3] were obtained using this step-function approximation. Its accuracy, however, is far from what is needed for the planning and optimization of the muonic hydrogen hyperfine experiment because the contribution from the atoms with energies in the whole epithermal range is averaged over their energy distribution and is accounted for with a single parameter — the disappearance slope for the “unexpected delayed” events [6] — which incorporates the uncertainties due to the strongly model-dependent energy distribution of the epithermal atoms [18–20].

  • Hyperfine spectroscopy of muonic hydrogen and the PSI Lamb shift experiment

    2012, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms
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    The corrections δpol and δhvp have been calculated in [9] with the use of phenomenological input data. The latter initiated the development of a modification of the experimental method of Ref. [22] in which the time distribution of the events of muon transfer to the nuclei of an appropriate gaseous admixture to the hydrogen target – rather than to the nuclei of the target walls – is used as signature of the laser-stimulated spin–flip in a muonic hydrogen atom [24]. While quantum mechanics predicts that, in the general case, the rate of muon transfer should be independent of the collision energy in the low energy limit, there are experimental evidences that the muon transfer rate to oxygen has a resonance-like behavior around 0.1 eV [27] and theoretical results [28,29] indicating that other gases may also exhibit a strong energy dependence in the same range of interest.

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On leave from: Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Blvd, Trakia 72, Sofia 1784, Bulgaria. a high power tunable pulsed laser.

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