Calculation of QED Effects in Hydrogen

Abstract

Atomic mass differences are influenced by QED corrections, and a reliable understanding of these corrections is therefore of importance for the current and next generation of high-precision mass determinations based on Penning traps. We present a numerical evaluation of the self-energy correction, which is the dominant contribution to the Lamb shift, in the region of low nuclear charge. Our calculation is nonperturbative in the binding field and has a numerical uncertainty of 0.8Hz in atomic hydrogen for the ground state and of 1.0Hz for L-shell states (2S 1/2, 2P 1/2, and 2P 3/2).