Speaker
Summary
Over the past half-century, the RMS charge radii of the proton and
deuteron have been determined using elastic electron scattering or
Lamb shifts in ordinary and muonic hydrogen. The discrepancies between
the quoted radii from these three methods suggest that either
some of the data are in error, or new physics governs the muonic
interaction. My colleagues and I have reexamined previous scattering
measurements and find them to be consistent with the muonic Lamb shift
results. Nevertheless, the largest theoretical uncertainties in atomic
measurements come from the nuclear polarizability terms in hyperfine
splittings, which depend on nuclear form factors and structure functions.
Hence, precise nuclear and atomic physics experiments remain interdependent.
