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Theo Nieuwenhuizen treats the hydrogen ground state as the touchstone for stochastic electrodynamics. This classical theory aims to explain quantum phenomena through a physical stochastic field that fills the universe and acts on charged particles, and earlier work reproduced the shape of the quantum ground state from it. His earlier work showed, numerically and theoretically, that the model hydrogen atom self-ionises after a characteristic time. For the harmonic oscillator he had renormalised the stochastic force to suppress high-frequency tails, so that physical resonances dominate every frequency integral. Here he applies several such noise renormalisation schemes to hydrogen: some behave well, while others create low-frequency pathologies. None of them removed the self-ionisation.

Stochastic Electrodynamics: Renormalized Noise in the Hydrogen Ground-State Problem