Reexamining Black-Body Shifts for Hydrogenlike Ions

Abstract

We investigate black-body induced energy shifts for low-lying levels of atomic systems, with a special emphasis on transitions used in current and planned high-precision experiments on atomic hydrogen and ionized helium. Fine-structure and Lamb-shift induced black-body shifts are found to increase with the square of the nuclear charge number, whereas black-body shifts due to virtual transitions decrease with increasing nuclear charge as the fourth power of the nuclear charge. We also investigate the decay width acquired by the ground state of atomic hydrogen, due to interaction with black-body photons. The corresponding width is due to an instability against excitation to higher excited atomic levels, and due to black-body induced ionization. These effects limit the lifetime of even the most fundamental, a priori absolutely stable, "asymptotic" state of atomic theory, namely the ground state of atomic hydrogen.

11 pages; LaTeX

References in corpus (2)

• Non-relativistic bound states at finite temperature (I): the hydrogen atom
• Theoretical study of the accuracy limits for the optical resonance frequency measurements

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Non-relativistic bound states at finite temperature (II): the muonic hydrogen
• Two-photon atomic level widths at finite temperatures
• Thermal corrections to the bound-electron $g$-factor
• Combined two-loop self-energy corrections at finite and zero temperatures
• Thermal one-loop self-energy correction for hydrogen-like systems: Relativistic approach
• Radiative corrections to the level width in the presence of magnetic field