Challenges with Internal Photons in Constructive QED

We find the correct spinor amplitude for a simple photon-mediated process and show that, in contrast, the result for the same process using the standard constructive techniques do not agree with Feynman diagrams when the fermions are massive. Along the way, we analyze the \(x\) factor used in photon...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2023-06
Main Authors: Christensen, Neil, Diaz-Quiroz, Harold, Field, Bryan, Hayward, Justin, Miles, John
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amplitudes
Apexes
Atoms & subatomic particles
Feynman diagrams
Photons
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We find the correct spinor amplitude for a simple photon-mediated process and show that, in contrast, the result for the same process using the standard constructive techniques do not agree with Feynman diagrams when the fermions are massive. Along the way, we analyze the \(x\) factor used in photon vertices, we work out the spinor shifts for massive particles when the momenta are analytically continued and we consider the large \(z\) limit of the amplitudes in this paper and show that the photon-mediated process does not vanish in this limit for any choice of two of its momenta. For comparison with the photon-mediated process, we also describe two processes with external photons that are mediated by massive particles. In both cases, we show that the current techniques are sufficient and that the final results agree with Feynman diagrams. We also demonstrate that by using a massive photon in our calculations and taking the massless limit at the end, we can achieve agreement with Feynman diagrams in all the processes discussed here, including the photon-mediated amplitudes.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2209.15018