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What does Hyperfine Splitting exactly mean?

I am having a bit of trouble understanding the concept of hyperfine splitting.

I solved the problem of including hyperfine interaction for the ground state of Hydrogen and I found the eigenvalues. However, I can't understand the physical meaning.

What I think...

Once we include the hyperfine interaction for the ground state of Hydrogen, we find three states with energy $A$ and one state with energy $-3A$. Does it mean that the ground state is not just a single state but is split in four states?

ryan1
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  • The one state with lowest energy, the spin singlet, is the ground state. – mike stone Apr 10 '21 at 20:05
  • @mikestone so it means that the ground state energy decreases when we include the hyperfine interaction. Then what is the significance of the other 3 states? – ryan1 Apr 10 '21 at 20:36

1 Answers1

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The ground of hydrogen atom in the Coulumb potential is $$ E_0 = - 13.6057 eV. $$ Its wavefunction $$ \psi(\vec{r}) = \mathbb{N} \exp\left(-\frac{r}{a_B}\right).\,\,\,\text{ where } a_B = 0.529177 \dot A $$ The degeneracy of the ground state is two electron spin states: $\vert \uparrow \rangle$ , and $\vert \downarrow \rangle$

The above description is our common knowledge about the ground state of $H(1S)$. But the above saying omitted the states of proton in the nuleus of hydrogen. There, the proton has spin $I = \frac{1}{2}$. Taking the proton's spin into account, the degeneracy of $H(1s)$ is $4$:

$$ \vert S_3 I_3 \rangle = \vert \uparrow \uparrow \rangle;\,\vert \uparrow \downarrow \rangle;\,\vert \downarrow \uparrow \rangle;\,\vert \downarrow \downarrow \rangle $$

Therefore, is we consider the interaction between the electron spin and the proton spin (the hyperfine interaction) into consideration, $S\cdot I$. Using additive of angular momentum $$ \vert S= \frac{1}{2}\rangle \oplus \vert I =\frac{1}{2}\rangle \Longrightarrow j= 0\,; \,\,\, 1. $$

The singlet state $j=0$ gives one single state, and the triplet state $j=1$ gives three degenerstate: \begin{align} \vert j=0, m \rangle = & \,\, \vert 0, 0 \rangle; \,\,\Longrightarrow \Delta E = -3A\\ \vert j=1, m \rangle = & \,\,\vert 1, 1 \rangle, \,\vert 1, 0 \rangle,\,\vert 1, -1 \rangle\,\,\Longrightarrow \Delta E = +A \end{align}

The pertubation of hyperfine interaction conserves the total sum of energy, therefore as the triplet states rise an amount of energy $A$ to $13.6057+A$, the singlet lower the energy by $3A$ to $13.657 - 3A$. The value of $A$ is very small, $A \approx 6\times 10^{-6} eV$. The splitting can only by observed by ESR (electron spin resonance, a microwave absorption technique).

ytlu
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