A New Application of a Lamb-shift Polarimeter

With the use of a spinfilter as the most important component of a Lamb-shift polarimeter, a beam of metastable atoms in one hyperfine state (alpha1 or alpha2) can be produced. By induced transitions it seems possible to observe any transition between the 2S1/2 metastable hyperfine states or into the short-lived states 2P1/2 and 2P3/2 of the hydrogen (deuterium) atom separately as a function of the magnetic field. According to our estimate, the Breit-Rabi diagrams for these states can be measured with a precison of about 1 kHz (4.2X10-12 eV) or even better. Furthermore, the hyperfine splittings and the Lamb shift can be observed as well.