Nuclear Deformation Effects in the Spectra of Highly Charged Ions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nuclear deformation influences the electronic spectra of highly charged ions, providing detailed calculations across many nuclei to aid spectral analysis and physics searches.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify deformation effects on electronic energies and properties by solving the Dirac equation with deformed nuclear potentials, covering over 1100 nuclei.

Findings

Deformation corrections significantly affect spectral properties.

The study provides a comprehensive database of deformation effects.

Implications for precision spectroscopy and new physics searches.

Abstract

Nuclear deformation effects are theoretically investigated in terms of deformation corrections of the electronic binding and transition energies, $g$ factor, and hyperfine splitting constant. By solving the Dirac equation twice, with the nuclear potential calculated from Fermi and deformed Fermi nuclear density distributions, we separate the deformation effect in binding energies and wavefunctions. The parameters for both models are determined from experimental data. The considered corrections are of interest for spectral analysis and are numerically calculated for the widest possible range of nuclei, consisting over 1100 different samples. The subtleties between different sources of measured data and the corresponding results are discussed. In addition, the importance of deformation effects for the search of new physics with singly-charged ions is examined.