Muonic hydrogen and the proton size

Abstract

We reexamine the structure of the $n=2$ levels of muonic hydrogen using a two-body potential that includes all relativistic, recoil and one loop corrections. The potential was originally derived from QED to describe the muonium atom and accounts for all contributions to order $α^5$. Since one loop corrections are included, the anomalous magnetic moment contributions of the muon can be identified and replaced by the proton anomalous magnetic moment to describe muonic hydrogen with a point-like proton. This serves as a convenient starting point to include the dominant electron vacuum polarization corrections to the spectrum and extract the proton's mean squared radius $r_p=\sqrt{\langle r^2\rangle}$. Our results are consistent with other theoretical calculations that find that the muonic hydrogen value for $r_p$ is smaller than the result obtained from electron scattering.

18 pages, 2 Tables, content added