Angular momentum of the electron: One-loop studies

Abstract

We combine bare perturbation theory with the imaginary time evolution technique to study one-loop radiative corrections to various components of angular momentum of the electron. Our investigations are based on the canonical decomposition of angular momentum, where spin and orbital components, associated with fermionic and electromagnetic degrees of freedom, are individually approached. We use for this purpose quantum electrodynamics in the general covariant gauge and develop a formalism, based on the repeated use of the Sochocki-Plemelj formula, for proper enforcement of the imaginary time limit. It is then shown that careful implementation of imaginary time evolutions is crucial for getting a correct result for total angular momentum of the electron in the bare perturbative expansion. We also analyze applicability of the Pauli-Villars regularization to our problem, developing a variant of this technique based on modifications of studied observables by subtraction of their ghost operator counterparts. It is then shown that such an approach leads to the consistent regularization of all angular momenta that we compute.