Relativistic calculations on isotope shifts in barium

Abstract

When the effects of the finite mass of the nucleus and the spatial nuclear charge distribution are taken into account in the Hamiltonian describing an atomic system, the isotopes of an element have different electronic energy levels. In the present work, we are investigating these mass and field effects in neutral barium, hoping to shed some light on the surprising observed deviation of isotope shifts from their expected behavior for odd isotopes in an analysis based on King-plots.