Improving Euler-Heisenberg-Schwinger effective action with dressed photons

Abstract

We implement a longstanding proposal by Weisskopf to apply virtual polarization corrections to the in/out external fields in study of the Euler-Heisenberg-Schwinger effective action. Our approach requires distinguishing the electromagnetic and polarization fields based on mathematical tools developed by Bia{\l}ynicki-Birula, originally for the Born-Infeld action. Our solution is expressed as a differential equation where the one-loop effective action serves as input. As a first result of our approach, we recover the higher-order one-cut reducible loop diagrams discovered by Gies and Karbstein.