Effects of the electron correlation and Breit and hyperfine interactions on the lifetime of the 2p$^5$3s states in neutral neon

TL;DR

This study uses advanced quantum mechanical methods to analyze how electron correlation, Breit, and hyperfine interactions affect the transition properties and lifetimes of excited states in neutral neon, providing detailed theoretical insights and comparisons with experiments.

Contribution

It systematically investigates the effects of electron correlation, Breit, and hyperfine interactions on neon's excited states using multiconfiguration Dirac-Hartree-Fock calculations, highlighting the importance of these factors.

Findings

Breit interaction reduces oscillator strength by 17%.

Hyperfine interactions drastically decrease metastable state lifetimes.

Good agreement with experiments except for a 15% discrepancy in one transition.

Abstract

In the framework of the multiconfiguration Dirac-Hartree-Fock method, we investigate the transition properties of four excited states in the $2p^53s$ configuration of neutral neon. The electron correlation effects are taken into account systematically by using the active space approach. The effect of higher-order correlation on fine structures is shown. We also study the influence of the Breit interaction and find that it reduces the oscillator strength of the $^3P^o_1 - ^1S_0$ transition by 17%. It turns out that the inclusion of the Breit interaction is essential even for such a light atomic system. Our ab initio calculated line strengths, oscillator strengths and transition rates are compared with other theoretical values and experimental measurements. Good agreement is found except for the $^3P^o_2 - ^1S_0$ M2 transition for which discrepancies of around 15% between theories and experiments remain. In addition, the impact of hyperfine interactions on the lifetimes of the $^3P^o_0$ and $^3P^o_2$ metastable states is investigated for the $^{21}$Ne isotope (I=3/2). We find that hyperfine interactions reduce the lifetimes drastically. For the $^3P^o_0$ state the lifetime is decreased by a factor of 630.