The Lamb shift of the 1s state in hydrogen: Two-loop and three-loop contributions

We consider the 1s Lamb shift in hydrogen and helium ions, a quantity, required for an accurate determination of the Rydberg constant and the proton charge radius by means of hydrogen spectroscopy, as well as for precision tests of the bound-state QED. The dominant QED contribution to the uncertainty originates from α8m external-field contributions (i.e., the contributions at the non-recoil limit). We discuss the two- and three-loop cases and in particular, we revisit calculations of the coefficients B61,B60,C50 in standard notation. We have found a missing logarithmic contribution of order α2(Zα)6m. We have also obtained leading pure self-energy logarithmic contributions of order α2(Zα)8m and α2(Zα)9m and estimated the subleading terms of order α2(Zα)7m, α2(Zα)8m, and α2(Zα)9m. The determination of those higher-order contributions enabled us to improve the overall accuracy of the evaluation of the two-loop self-energy of the electron. We investigated the asymptotic behavior of the integrand related to the next-to-leading three-loop term (order α3(Zα)5m, coefficient C50 in standard notation) and applied it to approximate integration over the loop momentum. Our result for contributions to the 1s Lamb shift for the total three loop next-to-leading term is (−3.3±10.5)(α3/π3)(Zα)5m. Altogether, we have completed the evaluation of the logarithmic contributions to the 1s Lamb shift of order α8m and reduced the overall α8m uncertainty by approximately a factor of three for H, D, and He+ as compared with the most recent CODATA compilation.