paper

Effective Lagrangian in nonlinear electrodynamics and its properties of causality and unitarity

arXiv:1101.2343 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.83.105006

Abstract

In nonlinear electrodynamics, by implementing the causality principle as the requirement that the group velocity of elementary excitations over a background field should not exceed the speed of light in the vacuum and the unitarity principle as the requirement that the residue of the propagator should be nonnegative, we establish the positive convexity of the effective Lagrangian on the class of constant fields, also the positivity of all characteristic dielectric and magnetic permittivity constants that are derivatives of the effective Lagrangian with respect to the field invariants. Violation of the general principles by the one-loop approximation in QED at exponentially large magnetic field is analyzed resulting in complex energy ghosts that signal the instability of the magnetized vacuum. Superluminal excitations (tachyons) appear, too, but for the magnetic field exceeding its instability threshold. Also other popular Lagrangians are tested to establish that the ones leading to spontaneous vacuum magnetization possess wrong convexity.

Modified version of arXiv:0911.0640[hep-th] with Section IV and Appendix omitted, Subsections IIIC,D added, Subsection II D perfected, 33 pages, submitted to Phys. Rev. D

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