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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 …