26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Self-Consistent Muonic Orbitals and Nuclear Charge Distributions

Not scheduled

20m

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Contributed Oral AIP | Theoretical Physics (TPG)

Description

Muons are about 207 times heavier than an electron, but other than that have the same fundamental properties and, just like an electron, can orbit an atomic nucleus. Due to its mass, the orbit of the muon is much closer to the nucleus, making it very sensitive to the effects of the nuclear structure.

Conventional muonic binding energy calculations typically treat the influence of the muon on the nucleus perturbatively through the nuclear polarization correction. In this work, we instead investigate a fully self-consistent approach in which the muonic wavefunctions and nuclear charge distributions are solved simultaneously. The coupling between muon and the nucleus influences nuclear charge distribution, which in turn alters the muonic binding energies and associated QED contributions.

I will present our latest self-consistent calculations and quantify the impact of the muon-induced changes to the nuclear charge distribution. The results provide improved theoretical predictions for muonic energy levels and have important implications for the extraction of nuclear charge radii from high precision muonic spectroscopy.