Worldline master formulas for the dressed electron propagator. Part 2. On-shell amplitudes

In the first part of this series, we employed the second-order formalism and the “symbol” map to construct a particle path-integral representation of the electron propagator in a background electromagnetic field, suitable for open fermion-line calculations. Its main advantages are the avoidance of long products of Dirac matrices, and its ability to unify whole sets of Feynman diagrams related by permutation of photon legs along the fermion lines. We obtained a Bern-Kosower type master formula for the fermion propagator, dressed with N photons, in terms of the “N-photon kernel,” where this kernel appears also in “subleading” terms involving only N − 1 of the N photons.In this sequel, we focus on the application of the formalism to the calculation of on-shell amplitudes and cross sections. Universal formulas are obtained for the fully polarised matrix elements of the fermion propagator dressed with an arbitrary number of photons, as well as for the corresponding spin-averaged cross sections. A major simplification of the on-shell case is that the subleading terms drop out, but we also pinpoint other, less obvious simplifications.We use integration by parts to achieve manifest transversality of these amplitudes at the integrand level and exploit this property using the spinor helicity technique. We give a simple proof of the vanishing of the matrix element for “all +” photon helicities in the massless case, and find a novel relation between the scalar and spinor spin-averaged cross sections in the massive case. Testing the formalism on the standard linear Compton scattering process, we find that it reproduces the known results with remarkable efficiency. Further applications and generalisations are pointed out.

General Properties of Higher-Spin Fermion Interaction Currents and Their Test in πN-Scattering

The currents of higher-spin fermion interactions with zero- and half-spin particles are derived. They can be used for the N*(J) ↔ Nπ-transitions (N*(J) is thenucleon resonance with the J spin). In accordance with the theorem on currents and fields, the spin-tensors of these currents are traceless, and their products with the γ-matrices and the higher-spin fermion momentum vanish, similarly to the field spin-tensors. Such currents are derived explicitly for J=3/2and 5/2. It is shown that, in the present approach, the scale dimension of a higher spin fermion propagator equals to –1 for any J ≥ 1/2. The calculations indicate that the off-mass-shell N* contributions to the s-channel amplitudes correspond to J = JπN only ( JπN is the total angular momentum of the πN-system). As contrast, in the usually exploited approaches, such non-zero amplitudes correspond to 1/2 ≤ JπN ≤ J. In particular, the usually exploited approaches give non-zero off-mass-shell contributions of the ∆(1232)-resonance to the amplitudes S31, P31( JπN = 1/2) and P33, D33(JπN = 3/2), but our approach – to P33 and D33 only. The comparison of these results with the data of the partial wave analysis on the S31-amplitude in the ∆(1232)-region shows the better agreement for the present approach.

Confinement in the two-dimensional yukawa theory with the Higgs mass generation mechanism

We considered the two-dimensional theoretical field model of interaction of scalar and fermion fields with the Higgs potential. Contribution of instanton effects to total fermion propagator is calculated. Mass correction to the propagator in the presence of an instanton field is determined. The obtained results can be interpreted as confinement.

The constraint equation of the vertex function of quantum anomaly and Dyson–Schwinger equations in massless QED2 theory

In this paper, we calculate the quantum anomaly for the longitudinal and the transverse Ward–Takahashi (WT) identities for vector and axial-vector currents in QED2 theory by means of the point-splitting method. It is found that the longitudinal WT identity for vector current and transverse WT identity for axial-vector current have no anomaly while the longitudinal WT identity for axial-vector current and the transverse WT identity for vector current have anomaly in QED2 theory. Moreover, we study the four WT identities in massless QED2 theory and get the result that the four WT identities together give the constraint equation of the vertex function of quantum anomaly. At last, we discuss the Dyson–Schwinger equations in massless QED2 theory. It is found that the vertex function of the quantum anomaly has corrections for the fermion propagator and Schwinger model.