Is the H Atom Surrounded by A Cloud of Virtual Quanta Due to the Lamb Shift?
Source: Originally published on arXiv quant-ph on July 31, 2026.
arXiv:2607.27257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: \abstract{The Lamb shift, one of the most fundamental interactions in atomic physics, arises from the interaction of H atoms with the electromagnetic fluctuations of the quantum vacuum. The energy shift has been computed in a variety of ways. The energy shift, as Feynman and Power demonstrated, equals the change in the vacuum energy in the volume containing the H atoms due to the change in the index of refraction arising from the presence of the H atoms. By using this result and a group theoretical calculation of the contribution to the Lamb shift from each frequency of the vacuum fluctuations, we can obtain an expression for the size of the region of vacuum energy for each frequency \texorpdfstring{$\omega$}{{\omega}} around the H ato...
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