Monday, December 13, 2010

Questioning The Radius Of The Proton

A brief highlight of the just published paper out of the Paul Scherrer Institut on a recently-measured proton form factor using a muonic hydrogen. You also (I believe) get a free copy of the actual paper.

It will be interesting to see how CODATA handles this new information, and whether the radius of a proton will have a change in subsequent updates.

Zz.

1 comment:

Fernando said...

I love your blog and I just want to make a small correction: the work present on this paper (Bernauer et al.) was not done at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) but at the Mainz accelerator.
The work that was indeed done at PSI (concerning the proton radius) was published in June (Pohl et al., Nature) and reported the first time measurement of the Lamb shift in muonic hydrogen. This type of measurement allows the calculation of the proton radius with higher accuracy that electron-proton scattering experiments as the one reported in this paper. The results on the proton radius presented by Pohl showed a deviation by 5 sigma from the CODATA value (based on electron-proton scattering experiments).