Noncovariant gauge fixing in the quantum Dirac field theory of atoms and molecules

Abstract

Starting from the Weyl gauge formulation of quantum electrodynamics (QED), the formalism of quantum-mechanical gauge fixing is extended using techniques from nonrelativistic QED. This involves expressing the redundant gauge degrees of freedom through an arbitrary functional of the gauge-invariant transverse degrees of freedom. Particular choices of functional can be made to yield the Coulomb gauge and Poincaré gauge representations. The Hamiltonian we derive therefore serves as a good starting point for the description of atoms and molecules by means of a relativistic Dirac field. We discuss important implications for the ontology of noncovariant canonical QED due to the gauge freedom that remains present in our formulation.

8 pages, 0 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Extending the validity range of quantum optical master equations
• The Fermi problem with artificial atoms in circuit QED

Cited by in corpus (5)

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