Charge renormalisation in a mean-field approximation of QED

Abstract

We study the Bogoliubov-Dirac-Fock (BDF) model, a no-photon, mean-field approxi- mation of quantum electrodynamics that allows to study relativistic electrons interacting with the vacuum. It is a variational model in which states are represented by Hilbert- Schmidt operators. We prove a charge renormalisation formula that holds close to the non-relativistic limit: the density of a ground state is shown to be integrable although such a state is known not to be trace-class. We prove that we can take the non-relativistic limit by keeping track of the vacuum polarisation. We get an altered Hartree-Fock model due to the screening effect.