QED radiative corrections and many-body effects in atoms: vacuum polarization and binding energy shifts in alkali metals

TL;DR

This paper calculates vacuum polarization effects on atomic binding energies in alkali metals, emphasizing the significance of many-body effects and core relaxation, especially for orbitals with higher angular momentum.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive relativistic and many-body approach to quantify vacuum polarization and self-energy corrections in alkali atoms, including superheavy elements.

Findings

Many-body effects significantly enhance vacuum polarization shifts.

Higher angular momentum orbitals experience larger relative shifts.

Corrections for heavy elements are comparable to those for lighter ones.

Abstract

We calculate vacuum polarization corrections to the binding energies in neutral alkali atoms Na through to the superheavy element E119. We employ the relativistic Hartree-Fock method to demonstrate the importance of relaxation of the electronic core and the correlation potential method to study the effects of second and higher orders of perturbation theory. These many-body effects are sizeable for all orbitals, though particularly important for orbitals with angular momentum quantum number l>0. The orders of magnitude enhancement for d waves produces shifts that, for Rb and the heavier elements, are larger than those for p waves and only an order of magnitude smaller than the s-wave shifts. The many-body enhancement mechanisms that operate for vacuum polarization apply also to the larger self-energy corrections.