Hyperfine splitting of the dressed hydrogen atom ground state in non-relativistic QED

Abstract

We consider a spin-1/2 electron and a spin-1/2 nucleus interacting with the quantized electromagnetic field in the standard model of non-relativistic QED. For a fixed total momentum sufficiently small, we study the multiplicity of the ground state of the reduced Hamiltonian. We prove that the coupling between the spins of the charged particles and the electromagnetic field splits the degeneracy of the ground state.