Effect of realistic nuclear charge distributions on isotope shifts and progress towards the extraction of higher-order nuclear radial moments

Atomic spectral lines from different isotopes display a small shift in energy, commonly referred to as the line isotope shift. One of the components of the isotope shift is the field shift, which depends on the extent and the shape of the nuclear charge density distribution. The purpose of this work is to investigate how sensitive field shifts are with respect to variations in the nuclear size and shape and what information of nuclear charge distributions can be extracted from measurements. Nuclear properties are obtained from nuclear density functional theory calculations based on the Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approach. These results are combined with multiconfiguration Dirac-Hartree-Fock methods to obtain realistic field shifts and it is seen that phenomena such as nuclear deformation and variations in the diffuseness of nuclear charge distributions give measurable contributions to the isotope shifts. Using a different approach, we demonstrate the possibility to extract information concerning the nuclear charge densities from the observed field shifts. We deduce that combining methods used in atomic and nuclear structure theory gives an improved description of field shifts and that extracting additional nuclear information from measured isotope shifts is possible in the near future with improved experimental methods.