On the “contact” hyperfine interaction

Abstract

When Enrico Fermi analyzed the magnetic interaction between the electron and Na, Cs, and Rb nuclei in 1930, he used the Dirac equation to compute the energy of an electron interacting with a point charge and magnetic dipole (the nucleus) fixed at the origin. After the mathematical dust had settled, he found an interaction that appeared to act only at a single point: the center of the electron wavefunction; it has been called a contact interaction. In 1936, Casimir analyzed the magnetic interaction of proton and neutron spins in the ground state of the deuteron using the Schrödinger equation and classical electrodynamics. Using symmetries appropriate only to s states, and performing an integration by parts, he found that they, too, seemed to interact only at a single common point of the proton and neutron: their center-of-mass. When applied to hydrogen, his result agreed with Fermi's. We present an expanded version of Casimir's important but little-known calculation.