- #1
Riverplatense
- 2
- 0
Good day dear forum, greetings from Argentina. I am studying the Lamb Shift, which says that in the atomic orbitals, an upward energy shift occurs due to an interaction of the electron with itself. This means that a level s can have an energy slightly greater than a level p. So far so good, but there is something I do not understand and it is the following. This discovery also allowed us to estimate that the known factor g had a value slightly greater than 2 and not exactly 2 as previously thought. In the words of the book Rohlf Modern Physics from alpha to Z p.248: "There is a slight difference between the levels 2S (with j = 1/2) and 2P (with j = 1/2) since in the first case the j comes from the intrinsic angular momentum while in the second, the value of j comes from the unit of the orbital angular moment minus a half of the intrinsic angular momentum.If g is exactly equal to 2, then the z component of the angular momentum of the electron due to the intrinsic angular momentum is exactly equal to the z component of the magnetic moment due to a unit of orbital angular momentum. For g = 2, the energies of the n-fixed states depend only on the total angular momentum j and not on the sum of l and s that produce j, so since g is slightly greater than 2, the state P with j = 1/2 is less in energy than S with j = 1/2 ". I do not understand what g = 2 has to do with the z components of the moments being equal and why if g is greater than 2, the state P is smaller than that of S. I think I do not understand anything about that paragraph, any idea?