Nuclear structure effects are essential for describing hyperfine splittings from high-precision atomic spectroscopy measurements. These effects are often parametrized by the effective or elastic Zemach radii, with their difference being poorly understood. We show that the long-standing discrepancy between the effective and elastic Zemach radii in ${}^6\mathrm{Li}$ and ${}^7\mathrm{Li}$ could be resolved by taking into account nuclear polarizability effects in ab initio nuclear structure calculations. Our results demonstrate that nuclear polarizability effects, negligible in ${}^7\mathrm{Li}$, dominate in ${}^6\mathrm{Li}$ and explain the observed significant deviation between the effective and elastic Zemach radii. Furthermore, we show that the ratios between the nuclear polarizability contributions in different nuclei are universal in the limit of closure and SU(4) symmetry of nuclear forces. In particular, the nuclear polarizability contribution in an odd-odd nucleus is enhanced by a factor of ${\mu }_p/({\mu }_p+{\mu }_n)\simeq 3$, with ${\mu }_{n,p}$ denoting the nucleon magnetic moments, compared to its odd-$A$ isotopes. The same mechanism also explains the Zemach radius deviations observed in ${}^2\mathrm{H}$ and ${}^3\mathrm{He}$. These findings establish nuclear polarizability as the dominant source of isotope-dependent nuclear corrections to hyperfine splitting in light atoms.

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• Few-body systems
• Fine & hyperfine structure
• Nuclear radii
• 6 ≤ A ≤ 19
• Artificial neural networks
• Quantum Monte Carlo