Non-ideal quantum electrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive field-theoretic framework for non-ideal quantum electrodynamics, enabling the analysis of non-ideal effects and their influence on elementary processes and physical phenomena beyond ideal models.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized, renormalizable formulation of non-ideal QED, extending previous effective theories and enabling calculations at higher orders.

Findings

Derived non-ideal elementary processes at leading and next-to-leading order.

Identified physical effects unique to non-ideal QED not captured by earlier theories.

Reproduced ideal QED results in the appropriate limit.

Abstract

In this Letter we present a field-theoretic formulation for describing non-ideal quantum electrodynamic effects. It generalizes its ideal counterpart and is valid in the non-ideal domain. We compute some non-ideal elementary processes both at leading order as well as up to next-to-leading order. Furthermore, we present some physical effect taken up to next-to-leading order that is not described by earlier similar but non-renormalizable theories defined recently in literature thus characterizing all them, at most, as effective ones. Their effectiveness allows us to obtain such an effect only at leading order. We recover all the corresponding ideal results when we take the limit $a\rightarrow 1$, where $a$ is a parameter that encodes the non-ideal effects. All the results show an interplay between non-ideal properties and fluctuations.