Physics Commons^™

Structure Of Matter, 4, David Peak

Structure of Matter

Antiscreening: The triumph of lattice QCD

QED is a phenomenally accurate theory of the interactions of electrically charged particles with photons. The way interactions are described in QED—by adding electromagnetic potential fields to the energy and momentum operators in the charged particle field equations— is essentially exactly correct given that the detailed calculations that can be made in QED agree so well with observation. These calculations are possible because simple processes (involving small numbers of interaction vertices) are significantly more important than complicated processes. That is, QED is a “perturbative” theory. Higher order QED effects, therefore, invariably consist of small …