A Modern Anatomy of Electron Mass

Abstract

Motivated by the need to understand hadron masses, we reexamine an old problem in QED - the composition of the electron mass - in a modern perspective. We find that in the unrenormalized QED, the vacuum subtraction plays an important role in understanding various sources of the electron mass. The same issue is also discussed in the modified minimal subtraction scheme with an emphasis on the scale and scheme dependence in the analysis.

Typos corrected