Modified Coulomb potential with virtual photons following a canonical distribution

Abstract

The need for a cutoff in the Lamb shift calculation suggests that high-energy virtual photons do not interact with real particles. In this paper, we assume that the creation of virtual photons follows a canonical distribution. As a result, the Coulomb potential is modified to $V(r)=-z{e}^2\arctan (m_{c}r)/(2{\pi }^{2}r)$, and the zero-point energy density of the electromagnetic field becomes finite.

8 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Eliminating ultraviolet divergence in quantum field theory through use of the Boltzmann factor

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Eliminating ultraviolet divergence in quantum field theory through use of the Boltzmann factor