Renormalization - Self-interactions in Classical Physics

Self-interactions in Classical Physics

The problem of infinities first arose in the classical electrodynamics of point particles in the 19th and early 20th century.

The mass of a charged particle should include the mass-energy in its electrostatic field (Electromagnetic mass). Assume that the particle is a charged spherical shell of radius . The mass-energy in the field is

which becomes infinite in the limit as approaches zero. This implies that the point particle would have infinite inertia, making it unable to be accelerated. Incidentally, the value of that makes equal to the electron mass is called the classical electron radius, which (setting and restoring factors of and ) turns out to be

where is the fine structure constant, and is the Compton wavelength of the electron.

The total effective mass of a spherical charged particle includes the actual bare mass of the spherical shell (in addition to the aforementioned mass associated with its electric field). If the shell's bare mass is allowed to be negative, it might be possible to take a consistent point limit. This was called renormalization, and Lorentz and Abraham attempted to develop a classical theory of the electron this way. This early work was the inspiration for later attempts at regularization and renormalization in quantum field theory.

When calculating the electromagnetic interactions of charged particles, it is tempting to ignore the back-reaction of a particle's own field on itself. But this back reaction is necessary to explain the friction on charged particles when they emit radiation. If the electron is assumed to be a point, the value of the back-reaction diverges, for the same reason that the mass diverges, because the field is inverse-square.

The Abraham–Lorentz theory had a noncausal "pre-acceleration". Sometimes an electron would start moving before the force is applied. This is a sign that the point limit is inconsistent. An extended body will start moving when a force is applied within one radius of the center of mass.

The trouble was worse in classical field theory than in quantum field theory, because in quantum field theory a charged particle experiences Zitterbewegung due to interference with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs, thus effectively smearing out the charge over a region comparable to the Compton wavelength. In quantum electrodynamics at small coupling the electromagnetic mass only diverges as the logarithm of the radius of the particle.