Constraints on proton structure from precision atomic physics measurements

Abstract

Ground-state hyperfine splittings in hydrogen and muonium are very well measured. Their difference, after correcting for magnetic moment and reduced mass effects, is due solely to proton structure--the large QED contributions for a pointlike nucleus essentially cancel. The rescaled hyperfine difference depends on the Zemach radius, a fundamental measure of the proton, computed as an integral over a product of electric and magnetic proton form factors. The determination of the Zemach radius, (1.043 +/- 0.016) fm, from atomic physics tightly constrains fits to accelerator measurements of proton form factors. Conversely, we can use muonium data to extract an ``experimental'' value for QED corrections to hydrogenic hyperfine data; we find that measurement and theory are consistent.