We explore the equation of state for nuclear matter in the quark-meson coupling model, including full Fock terms. The comparison with phenomenological constraints can be used to restrict the few additional parameters appearing in the Fock terms which
are not present at Hartree level. Because the model is based upon the in-medium modification of the quark structure of the bound hadrons, it can be applied without additional parameters to include hyperons and to calculate the equation of state of dense matter in beta-equilibrium. This leads naturally to a study of the properties of neutron stars, including their maximum mass, their radii and density profiles.
We investigate the influence of the spatial extent of the proton magnetization and charge densities on the 2S hyperfine splitting in muonic hydrogen. The use of a non-perturbative relativistic Dirac approach leads to corrections of 15% to values obta
ined from the perturbative treatment encapsulated by the Zemach radius, which surpass the next-leading order contribution in the perturbation series by an order of magnitude.
The measurement of the 2P^{F=2}_{3/2} to 2S^{F=1}_{1/2} transition in muonic hydrogen by Pohl et al. and subsequent analysis has led to the conclusion that the rms radius of the proton differs from the accepted (CODATA) value by approximately 4%, cor
responding to a 4.9 sigma discrepancy. We investigate the finite-size effects - in particular the dependence on the shape of the proton electric form-factor - relevant to this transition using bound-state QED with nonperturbative, relativistic Dirac wave-functions for a wide range of idealised charge-distributions and a parameterization of experimental data in order to comment on the extent to which the perturbation-theory analysis which leads to the above conclusion can be confirmed. We find no statistically significant dependence of this correction on the shape of the proton form-factor.
