Dynamical Electron Mass in a Strong Magnetic Field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a strong magnetic field influences the dynamical generation of electron mass in QED, revealing that the magnetic field significantly enhances mass generation through chiral symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It provides a nonperturbative numerical calculation of the dynamical electron mass in strong magnetic fields using Schwinger-Dyson equations within the lowest Landau level approximation.

Findings

Dynamical electron mass is significantly enhanced by strong magnetic fields.

Explicit chiral symmetry breaking perturbative mass influences dynamical mass generation.

The study employs a consistent truncation of Schwinger-Dyson equations for calculations.

Abstract

Motivated by recent interest in understanding properties of strongly magnetized matter, we study the dynamical electron mass generated through approximate chiral symmetry breaking in QED in a strong magnetic field. We reliably calculate the dynamical electron mass by numerically solving the nonperturbative Schwinger-Dyson equations in a consistent truncation within the lowest Landau level approximation. It is shown that the generation of dynamical electron mass in a strong magnetic field is significantly enhanced by the perturbative electron mass that explicitly breaks chiral symmetry in the absence of a magnetic field.