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In physics, the Lamb shift, named after Willis Lamb, is an anomalous difference in energy between two electron orbitals in a hydrogen atom. The difference was not predicted by theory and it cannot be derived from the Dirac equation , which predicts identical energies.
Willis Lamb had found when probing hydrogen atoms with microwave beams that one of the two possible quantum states had slightly more energy than predicted by the Dirac theory; this became known as the Lamb shift. Lamb had discovered the shift a few weeks before (with Robert Retherford), so this was a
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (/ l æ m /; July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum."
Robert Curtis Retherford (1912–1981) was an American physicist.He was a graduate student of Willis Lamb at Columbia Radiation Laboratory.Retherford and Lamb performed the famous experiment (now known as the Lamb–Retherford experiment) revealing Lamb shift in the fine structure of hydrogen, a decisive experimental step toward a new understanding of quantum electrodynamics.
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In 1947, Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford measured the minute difference in the 2 S 1/2 and 2 P 1/2 energy levels of the hydrogen atom, also called the Lamb shift. By ignoring the contribution of photons whose energy exceeds the electron mass, Hans Bethe successfully estimated the numerical value of the Lamb shift.
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Based on Kroll's thesis work, the paper provided the first theoretical explanation of the Lamb shift in QED and became one of the most important landmarks of the field. [ 1 ] In the academic year 1948–1949 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study , where he, with Robert Karplus , calculated the QED two-loop contributions ...