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28 August 2016 to 4 September 2016
Europe/Athens timezone

Effective field theories for muonic hydrogen

30 Aug 2016, 19:10
15m
Amfitrion I (Makedonia Palace)

Amfitrion I

Makedonia Palace

Section E: QCD and New Physics Section E

Speaker

Clara Peset (UAB/IFAE)

Description

Experimental measurements of muonic hydrogen bound states have recently started to take place and provide a powerful setting in which to study the properties of QCD. We profit of the power of effective field theories (EFTs) to provide a theoretical setting in which to study muonic hydrogen in a model independent fashion. In particular, we compute expressions for the Lamb shift and the hyperfine splitting.

These expressions include the leading logarithmic O(mμα6) terms, as well as the leading O(mμα5mμ2ΛQCD2) hadronic effects. Most remarkably, our analyses include the determination of the spin-dependent and spin-independent structure functions of the forward virtual-photon Compton tensor of the proton to O(p3), using HBET and including the Delta particle. Using these results we obtain the leading hadronic contributions to the Wilson coefficients of the lepton-proton four fermion operators in NRQED. The spin-independent coefficient yields a pure prediction for the two-photon exchange contribution to the muonic hydrogen Lamb shift, which is the main source of uncertainty in our computation. The spin-dependent coefficient yields the prediction of the hyperfine splitting. The use of EFTs crucially helps us organizing the computation, in such a way that we can clearly address the parametric accuracy of our result. Furthermore, we review in the context of NRQED all the contributions to the energy shift of O(mrα5), as well as those that scale like mrα6× logarithms.

Author

Clara Peset (UAB/IFAE)

Presentation materials