Breit corrections to moderately charged ions in all-orders calculations

TL;DR

This paper incorporates Breit interactions into all-orders calculations of energy levels and fine structure in heavy, moderately charged ions, revealing large corrections and improved agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a method to include Breit interactions into all-orders correlation calculations, enhancing accuracy for atomic properties of heavy ions.

Findings

Breit corrections are large for f states in ions.

Including Breit improves fine-structure interval calculations.

Frequency-dependent Breit has minimal effect at Dirac-Fock level.

Abstract

The atomic properties of heavy, moderately-charged ions are important for a wide variety of applications, including precision tests of fundamental physics and for the study and development of atomic and nuclear clocks. In these systems it is known that relativistic effects, such as the Breit interaction and radiative quantum electrodynamics corrections, are important for an accurate understanding of atomic properties. It is also known that inclusion of correlations alongside the Breit effect is crucial. In this work we include the Breit interaction into all-orders calculations of energy levels and fine structure intervals of ions in the Cs and Fr isoelectronic sequences. This requires modifying the electron Green's function to account for Breit within the all-orders correlation potential method, which sums dominating series of perturbation diagrams exactly using a Feynman diagram technique. We find that Breit corrections to the energies of moderately ionized ions along these sequences are very large, particularly for the f states. We also observe a significant deviation from experiment for these levels. Incorporating Breit into the all-orders correlation potential provides a significant additional contribution beyond including Breit at the second-order level alone. While this does not resolve the disagreement in the energy levels, it does substantially improve the fine-structure intervals beyond what is achieved by including Breit only at second order. Furthermore, we include the frequency-dependent Breit interaction into the Dirac-Fock procedure, and find that this does not significantly modify the energy levels at this order of approximation.