Absence of Embedded Mass Shells: Cerenkov Radiation and Quantum Friction

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in a quantum field model, the particle's embedded mass shell dissolves into the continuum upon interaction, with the only possible mass shell existing away from the unperturbed boundary.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous analysis showing the disappearance of embedded mass shells in a coupled quantum particle-field system under small interactions.

Findings

Embedded mass shells dissolve into the continuum with interaction.

Mass shells can only exist away from the unperturbed boundary.

The analysis relies on differentiability assumptions of eigenvectors.

Abstract

We show that, in a model where a non-relativistic particle is coupled to a quantized relativistic scalar Bose field, the embedded mass shell of the particle dissolves in the continuum when the interaction is turned on, provided the coupling constant is sufficiently small. More precisely, under the assumption that the fiber eigenvectors corresponding to the putative mass shell are differentiable as functions of the total momentum of the system, we show that a mass shell could exist only at a strictly positive distance from the unperturbed embedded mass shell near the boundary of the energy-momentum spectrum.