In physics, the Lamb shift, named after Willis Lamb (1913–2008), is a small difference in energy between two energy levels and (in term symbol notation) of the hydrogen atom in quantum electrodynamics (QED). According to Dirac, the and orbitals should have the same energies. However, the interaction between the electron and the vacuum causes a tiny energy shift on . Lamb and Robert Retherford measured this shift in 1947, and this measurement provided the stimulus for renormalization theory to handle the divergences. It was the harbinger of modern quantum electrodynamics developed by Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, and Shinichiro Tomonaga. Lamb won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 for his discoveries related to the Lamb shift.
Read more about Lamb Shift: Derivation, Experimental Work, Lamb Shift in The Hydrogen Spectrum
Famous quotes containing the words lamb and/or shift:
“Your friends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own, without thinking that you should follow theirs. Thus, in fact, they all think themselves wiser than you, whatever they may say.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)
“The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)