The Renormalized Electron Mass in Non-Relativistic Quantum Electrodynamics

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of infrared mass renormalization for a scalar electron in a translation-invariant model of non-relativistic QED. We assume that the interaction of the electron with the quantized electromagnetic field comprises a fixed ultraviolet regularization and an infrared regularization parametrized by $σ>0$. For the value $p=0$ of the conserved total momentum of electron and photon field, bounds on the renormalized mass are established which are uniform in $σ\to0$, and the existence of a ground state is proved. For $|p|>0$ sufficiently small, bounds on the renormalized mass are derived for any fixed $σ>0$. A key ingredient of our proofs is the operator-theoretic renormalization group using the isospectral smooth Feshbach map. It provides an explicit, finite algorithm that determines the renormalized electron mass at $p=0$ to any given precision.

AMS LaTeX, 101 pages