At the core of the “proton radius puzzle” is a four–standard deviation discrepancy between the proton root-mean-square charge radii (rp) determined from the regular hydrogen (H) and the muonic ...

The physicists' quarry is the Rydberg constant, the quantity that specifies the precise color of light that is emitted when an electron jumps from one energy level to another in an atom. The ...

What is certain is that this changes the Rydberg constant. Quantum physicists use this constant to calculate which energy packets atoms and molecules absorb and emit when they change their states.

Credit: Sonnet Malakaran George/Alamy An analysis of the jumps of a hydrogen atom’s electron has yielded a new, precise value for the Rydberg constant, a fundamental quantity in physics 1.