Electron Anomalous Magnetic Moment in Basis Light-Front Quantization Approach

TL;DR

This paper employs the Basis Light-Front Quantization approach to non-perturbatively compute the electron's anomalous magnetic moment in QED, achieving results close to the known Schwinger value with improved methods.

Contribution

It introduces analytic techniques within BLFQ for evaluating QED vertex matrix elements and demonstrates high-precision calculation of the electron magnetic moment.

Findings

Reproduces the Schwinger result with less than 0.6% deviation.

Develops analytic methods for vertex matrix element evaluation.

Achieves significant improvements over previous non-perturbative approaches.

Abstract

We apply the Basis Light-Front Quantization (BLFQ) approach to the Hamiltonian field theory of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) in free space. We solve for the mass eigenstates corresponding to an electron interacting with a single photon in light-front gauge. Based on the resulting non-perturbative ground state light-front amplitude we evaluate the electron anomalous magnetic moment. The numerical results from extrapolating to the infinite basis limit reproduce the perturbative Schwinger result with relative deviation less than 0.6%. We report significant improvements over previous works including the development of analytic methods for evaluating the vertex matrix elements of QED.