NRQED and Next-to-Leading Hyperfine Splitting in Positronium

Abstract

We compute the next-to-leading, O(m alpha^5), contribution to the hyperfine splitting in positronium within the framework of NRQED. When applied to the ground state, our calculation reproduces known results, providing a further test of NRQED techniques. Besides providing a very simple method of calculation of the standard result, we also obtain new expressions for excited states of positronium with negligible additional effort. Our calculation requires the complete next-to-leading matching of the lowest-dimension NRQED four-fermi couplings, which we publish here for the first time.

24 pages, plain TeX, 6 figures included using epsf