https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20148101009
Puzzling out the proton radius puzzle
Institut für Kernphysik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, DE-55128 Mainz, Germany
a e-mail: miham@kph.uni-mainz.de
Published online: 26 November 2014
The discrepancy between the proton charge radius extracted from the muonic hydrogen Lamb shift measurement and the best present value obtained from the elastic scattering experiments, remains unexplained and represents a burning problem of today’s nuclear physics: after more than 50 years of research the radius of a basic constituent of matter is still not understood. This paper presents a summary of the best existing proton radius measurements, followed by an overview of the possible explanations for the observed inconsistency between the hydrogen and the muonic-hydrogen data. In the last part the upcoming experiments, dedicated to remeasuring the proton radius, are described.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2014
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
