Spectrum of Hydrogen Atom in Space-Time Non-Commutativity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how space-time non-commutativity affects the hydrogen atom's spectrum, leading to energy shifts similar to the Lamb shift and providing bounds on the non-commutative parameter through spectral analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of space-time non-commutativity to the hydrogen atom, deriving analytical energy corrections and bounds on the non-commutative parameter.

Findings

Non-commutativity modifies the Coulomb potential to a Kratzer potential.

Energy levels exhibit shifts removing degeneracies, akin to Lamb shift.

Derived bounds on non-commutative parameter from spectroscopic data.

Abstract

We study space-time noncommutativity applied to the hydrogen atom and its phenomenological effects. We find that it modifies the potential part of the Hamiltonian in such a way we get the Kratzer potential instead of the Coulomb one and this is similar to add a dipole potential or to consider the extended charged nature of the proton in the nucleus. By calculating the energies from the Schr\"odinger equation analytically and computing the fine structure corrections using perturbation theory, we study the modifications of the hydrogen spectrum. We find that it removes the degeneracy with respect to both the orbital quantum number l and the total angular momentum quantum number j; it acts here like a Lamb shift. Comparing the results with the experimental values from spectroscopy, we get a new bound for the space-time non-commutative parameter. We do the same perturbative calculation for the relativistic case and compute the corrections of the Dirac energies; we find that in this case too, the corrections are similar to a Lamb shift and they remove the degeneracy with respect to j ; we get an other bound for the parameter of non-commutativity.