Long-Range Atom-Wall Interactions and Mixing Terms: Metastable Hydrogen

Abstract

We investigate the interaction of metastable 2S hydrogen atoms with a perfectly conducting wall, including parity-breaking S-P mixing terms (with full account of retardation). The neighboring 2P_1/2 and 2P_3/2 levels are found to have a profound effect on the transition from the short-range, nonrelativistic regime, to the retarded form of the Casimir-Polder interaction. The corresponding P state admixtures to the metastable 2S state are calculated. We find the long-range asymptotics of the retarded Casimir-Polder potentials and mixing amplitudes, for general excited states, including a fully quantum electrodynamic treatment of the dipole-quadrupole mixing term. The decay width of the metastable 2S state is roughly doubled even at a comparatively large distance of 918 atomic units (Bohr radii) from the perfect conductor. The magnitude of the calculated effects is compared to the unexplained Sokolov effect.

6 pages; RevTeX

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Cited by in corpus (4)

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• Long-Range Tails in van der Waals Interactions of Excited-State and Ground-State Atoms
• Spontaneous emission of a two-level atom with an arbitrarily polarized electric dipole in front of a flat dielectric surface
• Functional Form of the Imaginary Part of the Atomic Polarizability