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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Gravitational Correction To Vacuum Polarization, Ulrich D. Jentschura
Gravitational Correction To Vacuum Polarization, Ulrich D. Jentschura
Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works
We consider the gravitational correction to (electronic) vacuum polarization in the presence of a gravitational background field. The Dirac propagators for the virtual fermions are modified to include the leading gravitational correction (potential term) which corresponds to a coordinate-dependent fermion mass. The mass term is assumed to be uniform over a length scale commensurate with the virtual electron-positron pair. The on-mass shell renormalization condition ensures that the gravitational correction vanishes on the mass shell of the photon, i.e., the speed of light is unaffected by the quantum field theoretical loop correction, in full agreement with the equivalence principle. Nontrivial corrections …
One-Loop Dominance In The Imaginary Part Of The Polarizability: Application To Blackbody And Noncontact Van Der Waals Friction, Ulrich D. Jentschura, Grzegorz Lach, Maarten Dekieviet, Krzysztof Pachucki
One-Loop Dominance In The Imaginary Part Of The Polarizability: Application To Blackbody And Noncontact Van Der Waals Friction, Ulrich D. Jentschura, Grzegorz Lach, Maarten Dekieviet, Krzysztof Pachucki
Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works
Phenomenologically important quantum dissipative processes include blackbody friction (an atom absorbs counterpropagating blueshifted photons and spontaneously emits them in all directions, losing kinetic energy) and noncontact van der Waals friction (in the vicinity of a dielectric surface, the mirror charges of the constituent particles inside the surface experience drag, slowing the atom). The theoretical predictions for these processes are modified upon a rigorous quantum electrodynamic treatment, which shows that the one-loop "correction" yields the dominant contribution to the off-resonant, gauge-invariant, imaginary part of the atom's polarizability at room temperature, for typical atom-surface interactions. The tree-level contribution to the polarizability dominates …
Long-Range Atom-Wall Interactions And Mixing Terms: Metastable Hydrogen, Ulrich D. Jentschura
Long-Range Atom-Wall Interactions And Mixing Terms: Metastable Hydrogen, Ulrich D. Jentschura
Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works
We investigate the interaction of metastable 2S hydrogen atoms with a perfectly conducting wall, including parity-breaking S-P mixing terms (with full account of retardation). The neighboring 2P1/2 and 2P3/2 levels are found to have a profound effect on the transition from the short-range, nonrelativistic regime, to the retarded form of the Casimir-Polder interaction. The corresponding P state admixtures to the metastable 2S state are calculated. We find the long-range asymptotics of the retarded Casimir-Polder potentials and mixing amplitudes for general excited states, including a fully quantum electrodynamic treatment of the dipole-quadrupole mixing term. The decay width of the …