Effective Energy Approach to Collectively Quantized Systems

Abstract

We generalize effective energy variational techniques to study appropriately quantized solitonic field configurations. Our approach rests on collective quantization ideas and is specifically designed for the numerical evaluation of soliton parameters. We employ this method to obtain the one-loop quantum corrections to the soliton mass and form factor. Special attention is given to the regularization of the physical observables in the solitonic sector of the theory. The numerical implementation of the method is demonstrated for a simple one-dimensional scalar field example.