Positronium hydride decay into proton, electron, and one or zero photons

Abstract

Decay rates of the positronium hydride PsH, a bound state of a proton, a positron, and two electrons, are determined for two rare channels, PsH $\to p^+ e^- \gamma$ and PsH $\to p^+ e^-$. Previous studies overestimated these rates by factors of about 2 and 700, respectively. We explain the physics underlying these wrong predictions. We confirm a range of static PsH properties, including the non-relativistic ground state energy, expectation values of inter-particle distances and their powers, and the three and four particle coalescence probabilities, using a variational method in the Gaussian basis.