{"id":202890,"date":"2024-12-31T21:08:36","date_gmt":"2025-01-01T03:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/a-new-calculation-of-the-electrons-self-energy-improves-determination-of-fundamental-constants"},"modified":"2024-12-31T21:08:36","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T03:08:36","slug":"a-new-calculation-of-the-electrons-self-energy-improves-determination-of-fundamental-constants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/a-new-calculation-of-the-electrons-self-energy-improves-determination-of-fundamental-constants","title":{"rendered":"A new calculation of the electron\u2019s self-energy improves determination of fundamental constants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-new-calculation-of-the-electrons-self-energy-improves-determination-of-fundamental-constants.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When quantum electrodynamics, the quantum field theory of electrons and photons, was being developed after World War II, one of the major challenges for theorists was calculating a value for the Lamb shift, the energy of a photon resulting from an electron transitioning from one hydrogen hyperfine energy level to another.<\/p>\n<p>The effect was first detected by Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford in 1947, with the emitted photon having a frequency of 1,000 megahertz, corresponding to a photon wavelength of 30 cm and an energy of 4 millionths of an electronvolt\u2014right on the lower edge of the microwave spectrum. It came when the one electron of the hydrogen atom transitioned from the 2P<sub>1\/2<\/sub> energy level to the 2S<sub>1\/2<\/sub> level. (The leftmost number is the principal quantum number, much like the discrete but increasing circular orbits of the Bohr atom.) <\/p>\n<p>Conventional quantum mechanics didn\u2019t have such transitions, and Dirac\u2019s relativistic Schr\u00f6dinger equation (naturally called the <a href=\"https:\/\/mathworld.wolfram.com\/DiracEquation.html\" target=\"_blank\">Dirac equation<\/a>) did not have such a hyperfine transition either, because the shift is a consequence of interactions with the vacuum, and Dirac\u2019s vacuum was a \u201csea\u201d that did not interact with real particles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When quantum electrodynamics, the quantum field theory of electrons and photons, was being developed after World War II, one of the major challenges for theorists was calculating a value for the Lamb shift, the energy of a photon resulting from an electron transitioning from one hydrogen hyperfine energy level to another. The effect was first [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-science","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}