Über die Elektrodynamik des Vakuums auf Grund der Quantentheorie des Elektrons. Offprint from: Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Mathematisk-fysiske Meddelelser 24, no. 6, 1936. WEISSKOPF ANTICIPATES RENORMALIZATION

WEISSKOPF, Victor

Beschreibung

First edition, rare offprint, of this "classic paper on the polarization of thr vacuum" (National Academy of Sciences obituary, p. 12), in which Weisskopf anticipated the renormalization techniques in quantum electrodynamics developed more than a decade later by Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga (and for which they received the Nobel Prize). "As his term with Pauli [in Zurich] was ending, Viki [Weisskopf] received from Bohr a fellowship to work in Copenhagen where he spent the next two years. At the Bohr Institute, nuclear physics was beginning to be emphasized in addition to basic problems in quantum mechanics and field theory. Of the stimulating atmosphere at the institute, Viki said: 'Influenced by this remarkable group, I wrote two of my best papers during that time. The first paper is on polarization of the vacuum, that is, the properties of the vacuum in the presence of virtual electron-positron pairs and their interaction with electromagnetic fields.' This paper [offered here] is perhaps the most technically sophisticated of Viki's papers. It is a tour de force not repeated until Julian Schwinger's 1950 paper on the same topic. The subject had been discussed by Heisenberg and Euler within the framework of a formal subtraction scheme of Heisenberg's, but Viki addressed it comprehensively in a transparent way with the physical assumptions made very clear . . . The preliminaries had yielded three infinite quantities in field-free space: the total energy of the vacuum electrons, their charge and current densities, and the constant field-independent electric and magnetic polarizabilities of the vacuum. He asserted that these properties were unobservable and physically meaningless. They could therefore be subtracted to leave a finite, meaningful leave a finite, meaningful description of electromagnetic field interactions in the vacuum. He then said: 'It should also be added that the polarizability could in no way be observed, but would only multiply all charges and field strengths by a constant factor.' This is a prescient statement of the charge and wave-function renormalization of modern theory" (Jackson, Weisskopf Tribute, CERN Courier, December 2002). Miller, Source Book in Early Quantum Electrodynamics, 8. 8vo, pp. 39. Original printed wrappers. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers ABE-1681573065130

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Über die Elektrodynamik des Vakuums auf ...

Einband: Soft cover

Zustand: Near Fine

Auflage: 1st Edition