Honours Research

In 2020 I completed my Honours year at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), during which I conducted research in Theoretical Physics with Professor Victor Flambaum and PhD student Hoang Bao Tran Tan. I obtained a First Class Honours result for my performance during this year.

Thesis

Abstract

The behaviour of a charged particle in the Coulomb field of a nucleus with charge Z has been studied in literature in the case of spin-1/2 and spin-0 particles. This behaviour, and in turn the energy spectrum, depends on the nuclear model considered. For the aforementioned particles, a point-like nuclear model introduces complications such as the fall of the particle to the center, and imaginary ground state energy solutions beyond Z = 137 (spin-1/2) and Z = 68 (spin-0). Here, Z is the atomic charge value beyond which the real energy spectrum terminates. However, for Z < Z there are acceptable solutions for the wave functions, as well as for the energy spectra which are given by the Sommerfeld formula. It was shown that this is not the case for charged spin-1 particles, where a fall to the center occurs even for arbitrarily small values of Z. Although the introduction of a finite-sized nucleus of radius R for spin-1/2 and spin-0 particles pushes Z to Z > Z (Z being the pair creation threshold), the behaviour of spin-1 particles in the field of a finite-sized nucleus is yet to be studied. This is the aim of this project.