QED radiative corrections to electric dipole amplitudes in heavy atoms

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum electrodynamics (QED) radiative corrections to electric dipole transition amplitudes in heavy atoms and ions, using the radiative potential method, highlighting significant corrections in certain transitions.

Contribution

The study applies the radiative potential method to heavy atoms and ions, assessing various effects and validating the approach against rigorous QED calculations, providing new insights into QED corrections.

Findings

QED corrections can surpass experimental-theoretical discrepancies in some transitions.

Core relaxation and polarization effects significantly influence QED corrections.

The method's validity is confirmed through comparison with rigorous QED results.

Abstract

We use the radiative potential method to perform a detailed study of quantum electrodynamics (QED) radiative corrections to electric dipole (E1) transition amplitudes in heavy alkali-metal atoms Rb, Cs, Fr, and alkali-metal-like ions Sr+, Ba+, and Ra+. The validity of the method is checked by comparing with the results of rigorous QED in simple atomic potentials. We study the effects of core relaxation, polarization of the core by the E1 field, and valence-core correlations on QED, which are shown to be important in some cases. We identify several transitions for which the QED contribution exceeds the deviation between atomic theory and experiment.