Two-photon decay rates of hydrogenlike ions revisited by using Dirac-Coulomb Sturmian expansions of the first order

A fully relativistic multipole scheme is formulated to study two-photon emission processes in hydrogenlike ions with an infinitely heavy, pointlike, and spinless nucleus of charge up to 100. By making use of the Sturmian expansion of the Dirac-Coulomb Green function of the first order constructed by Szmytkowski, closed-form expressions are derived for arbitrary multipole channels. In the nonrelativistic limit, well-known formulas established previously are retrieved. For the sake of assessing the effectiveness of our approach, numerical applications are then carried out for two-photon decay rates of the selected 2s(1/2) and 2p(1/2) atomic states. To this end, radial integrals, the most crucial quantities involved in the matrix elements, are treated with great care by means of two suitable techniques that agree with each other quite closely so that very accurate values are obtained regardless of the choice of parameters, such as radial quantum numbers and orders of spherical Bessel functions of the first kind. In addition, the convergence and stability of computations are checked in connection with the intermediate-state summation, which appears within the second-order perturbation theory. As expected, the gauge invariance of our fully relativistic multipole numbers is confirmed. Relativistic effects, and the influence of the negative spectrum of the complete set of Dirac-Coulomb Sturmians of first order and retardation truncations in the transition operator are examined. Finally, a comparison is undertaken of our two-photon relativistic calculations with refined predictions of other authors based on finite basis-setmethods widely employed over the past decades.