Since the early days of quantum mechanics hydrogen, as the simplest of all atoms, has been studied or used to investigate new physics. In parallel, this knowledge leads to different applications, e.g. a spin filter to separate metastable hydrogen atoms in single hyperfine substates with electron spin m_s=1/2. Subsequently, this work provides the necessary theory as well as experimental conditions to build a new generation of spin filter which permits the separation of all four individual metastable hydrogen hyperfine states as well as for its isotopes in a corresponding beam.
Since the early days of quantum mechanics, hydrogen, as the simplest of all atoms, has been studied or used to investigate new physics. In the past this knowledge has been applied to develop a polarimeter where the initial nuclear polarization of a proton beam could be determined. The key component of this Lamb-shift polarimeter is the so called spin filter, which is able to separate one of four metastable hydrogen hyperfine states by quenching the remaining three hyperfine states to the ground state. Unfortunately, the conventional spin filter is only able to filter two out of the four hyperfine states individually. Therefore, this work provides the necessary theory as well as experimental conditions to build a new generation of spin filter which permits the separation and transmission of any metastable hydrogen hyperfine state as well as for its isotopes in a corresponding beam. This knowledge is applicable for other experiments in different fields of research, e.g. the bound beta decay, axion research or parity violation experiments.
Polarized atomic beam sources have been in operation for many years to produce either nuclear polarized atomic hydrogen or deuterium beams. In recent experiments, such a source was used to polarize both isotopes independently at the same time. By recombination of the atoms, hydrogen-deuterium molecules with all possible nuclear spin combinations can be created. Those spin isomers are useful for further applications, like precision spectroscopy, as polarized targets for laser-particle acceleration, polarized fuel for fusion reactors, or as an option for future measurements of electric dipole moments.
In the scientific community dominates the conviction that the hydrogen atom is the simplest, and existing theories based on equations of Schrodinger and Dirac fully describe all the subtleties of behavior of an electron in a hydrogen atom. In this paper and in the following articles will be shown that in addition to the known state-based solutions of the Schrodinger and Dirac equations, there are states which were not studied and they were not known, or often simply were discarded with the phrase have no physical meaning. Further it will be shown that the existing equations of quantum mechanics, namely the Dirac equation, Klein-Gordon equation and especially the Schrodinger equation, can not accurately describe all the subtleties of behavior of an electron in a hydrogen atom. As a result there will be given a reasonable basis for the feasibility of an experimental search or targeted synthesis of new unknown states of the hydrogen atom.
Experiments with atomic hydrogen are widespread because hydrogen is the simplest and theoretically most accessible atom. This is not only true for isolated atoms, but also for spin-polarised gases of cold hydrogen. In this unique system, in which the total spins of all the hydrogens are parallel, the atoms only interact in one of the large number of possible molecular potentials. This potential (Known as 3 Σ) does not allow bound states, leading to the expectation that spin-polarised hydrogen remains gaseous down to zero kelvin. But the lack of a suitable laser source for cooling hydrogen has prevented experimenters investigating the wealth of new physics expected at these temperatures.
Measurement of the occupation number of metastable atoms in the hyperfine-substate β
3 in an atomic hydrogen beam
After its discovery in 1947 by Willis Eugene Lamb and Robert C. Retherford the Lamb shift was used to create Lamb shift polarimeter to separate the
2S1/2 α1 and
α2 hyperfine substates of hydrogen as well as the
α3 substate of deuterium. But for a new project at the Technical University of Munich, investigation of the bound-beta decay of a neutron into a hydrogen atom and a neutrino, a Lamb shift polarimeter is needed that is also capable of separating the
β3 substate of hydrogen. Unfortunately, our first attempt to use a Sona transition unit to exchange the occupation numbers between
α1 and
β3 failed, because of the unexpected complexity of the transitions in this unit [1]. The second idea of using a new kind of spinfilter which uses two radio frequencies to separate all four hyperfine substates of hydrogen also failed. Our third attempt is now to build a transition unit that can induce magnetic dipole transitions between
α2 and
β3 as well as between
α2 and
β4 (
π transitions, i.e. an exchange of the occupation numbers of these states). This is a similar transition to what is used in atomic beam sources, in this case not for ground state atoms but for metastable atoms, which requires a much lower radio frequency. Another difference of this new idea is the smaller interaction time of the atoms with the photons inside the transition unit due to their much higher velocity of roughly
2⋅105 m/s compared to velocities of about
103 m/s in an atomic beam source.