Relativistic corrections to He I transition ratesThis paper was presented at the International Conference on Precision Physics of Simple Atomic Systems, held at École de Physique, les Houches, France, 30 May – 4 June, 2010.

Abstract

The relativistic corrections to the theoretical oscillator strengths of light elements such as helium are typically less than 0.1% and usually are ignored. However, they can be important for comparisons with the most accurate experiments, and they rapidly increase in magnitude with increasing nuclear charge. We have begun with the spin-forbidden electric-dipole transitions of neutral helium, using calculations consisting of (1) extremely accurate wave functions without relativistic corrections for both infinite and finite nuclear mass, (2) spin-changing matrix elements through the perturbations of the wave functions by the spin-orbit and spin-other-orbit Breit operators, (3) the use of pseudostates in the sums over all the intermediate states including the continuum, and (4) the inclusion as perturbers of the 1S0 and 3S1 states the pseudostates corresponding to the doubly excited npn′p 3P 0e and npn′p 1P 1e terms, respectively. As examples of these calculations, we present oscillator strengths for the transitions 1 1S0–2 3P1, 2 1S0–2 3P1, 2 3S1–2 1P1, 2 1P1–3 3D1,2, and 2 3P1,2–3 1D2.