Charge-field formulation of quantum electrodynamics (QEMED)

Abstract

By expressing classical electron theory in terms of “charge-field” functional structures, it is shown that a finite formulation of the classical electrodynamics of point charges emerges in a simple and elegant fashion. The classical charge-field form of microscopic electron theory plays the role of a covering theory for “renormalized classical electron theory,” with the distinct advantage that this is accomplished by adynamic subtraction mechanism, built into the theory. We then generalize this formalism into a hole-theoretic, second-quantized Dirac formulation, in order to construct a “charge-field” quantum electrodynamic theory, and discuss its basic properties. We find, in addition to the possibility that the finiteness of the classical theory may be propagated into the quantum field theory, that interacting photon states are generated as a secondary manifestation of electron-positron quantization, and do not require the usual “free” canonical quantization scheme. We discuss the possibility that this approach may lead to a better formulation of quantum electrodynamics in the Heisenberg picture and suggest a crucial experimental test to distinguish this new charge-field quantum electrodynamics “QEMED” from the standard QED formulation. Specifically QEMED predicts that the “Einstein principle of separability” should be found to be valid for correlated photon polarization measurements, in which the polarizers are changed more rapidly than a characteristic photon travel time. Such an experiment (Aspect, 1976) can distinguish between QEMED and QED in a complete and clear-cut fashion.