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Introduction
In this article, we will be revisiting a somewhat understudied (and seemingly unrepeated) experiment to measure the Deuterium Lyman Alpha line at approximately 121.5 nm. The experiment was carried out in the 1950s in the wake of the Lamb-Retherford experiment (1947) which established the tiny energy shift (Lamb shift) between the Hydrogen (and Deuterium) 2s and 2p 1/2 energy levels. According to the Dirac Energy equation, these two levels should be exactly equivalent but this experiment proved otherwise and hence ushered in the era of quantum electrodynamics. Such theory predicted that a similar shift – approximately 8 times greater in magnitude – should exist in the ground state (1s level) of atomic hydrogen and/or deuterium (ground state Lamb shift) and it was this that experimental physicist Gerhard...
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