Abstract
We investigate the interaction of metastable hydrogen atoms with a perfectly conducting wall, including parity-breaking mixing terms (with full account of retardation). The neighboring and levels are found to have a profound effect on the transition from the short-range, nonrelativistic regime, to the retarded form of the Casimir-Polder interaction. The corresponding state admixtures to the metastable state are calculated. We find the long-range asymptotics of the retarded Casimir-Polder potentials and mixing amplitudes for general excited states, including a fully quantum electrodynamic treatment of the dipole-quadrupole mixing term. The decay width of the metastable state is roughly doubled even at a comparatively large distance of 918 a.u. (Bohr radii) from the perfect conductor. The magnitude of the calculated effects is compared to the unexplained Sokolov effect.
- Received 20 March 2014
- Revised 2 October 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.91.010502
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