Eur. Phys. J. D 40, 317-323 (2006)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2006-00172-5

Theoretical study of the 5p⁵6s – 5p⁶ spectra of neutral xenon

¹ Department of Physics, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, 730070, P.R. China
² Institut für Physik, Universität Kassel, 34132 Kassel, Germany

Corresponding author: ^a dongcz@nwnu.edu.cn

Received: 14 October 2005
Revised: 4 April 2006
Published online: 18 July 2006

Abstract

Recent high precision measurements on the lifetime of the metastable 6s[3/2]₂ state of atomic xenon display a difference with previous predictions by a factor of 2–3. In the present work, a systematic relaxation and correlation approach, which has been developed on the basis of a widely used multi-configuration Dirac-Fock method, is applied to study the electric dipole allowed E1 and forbidden M1, E2 and M2 transitions between the 5p⁵ 6s and 5p⁶ configurations. We systematically include the correlation effects which arise from all the single and double excitations from the occupied shells into the (n=6–10) active sets and the relaxation effects caused by change of the electron density between the radiative initial- and final-states. This study not only reduces greatly the existing discrepancy in the lifetime of the 6s[3/2]₂ state, but also presents rather consistent results for both the lifetime of the metastable 6s'[1/2]₀ state and the oscillator strength of the 5p⁵ 6s - 5p⁶ E1 resonant transitions.