The Meson Mass Spectrum from a Systematically Renormalized Light-Front Hamiltonian

Abstract

We extend a systematic renormalization procedure for quantum field theory to include particle masses and present several applications. We use a Hamiltonian formulation and light-front quantization because this may produce a convergent Fock-space expansion. The QCD Hamiltonian is systematically renormalized to second order in the strong coupling and the Fock-space expansion is truncated to lowest order to produce a finite-dimensional Hamiltonian matrix. The renormalized Hamiltonian is used to calculate the spectra of the $b\bar{b}$ and $c\bar{c}$ mesons as a lowest-order test of our procedure for full QCD. The analytic determination of the renormalized Hamiltonian matrix generates expressions that must be numerically integrated to generate quantitative results. The efficiency of the numerical calculation depends on how well the basis functions can approximate the real state. We examine the effectiveness of using Basis-Splines (B-Splines) to represent QCD states. After briefly describing these functions, we test them using the one- and two-dimensional harmonic oscillator problems. We test their ability to represent realistic wavefunctions by using them to find the glueball mass spectrum. An efficient algorithm for numerically calculating the matrix elements in the glueball and meson problems is necessary because the calculation is numerically intensive. We describe our algorithm and discuss its parallel-cpu implementation.