Detailed study of nonperturbative solutions of two-body Dirac equations

摘要

In quark model calculations of the meson spectrums fully covariant two-body Dirac equations dictated by Dirac's relativistic constraint mechanics gave a good fit to the entire meson mass spectrum for light quark mesons as well as heavy quark mesons with constituent world scalar and vector potentials depending on just one or two parameters. In this paper, we investigate the properties of these equations that made them work so well by solving them numerically for quantum electrodynamics (QED) and related field theories. The constraint formalism generates a relativistic quantum mechanics defined by two coupled Dirac equations on a sixteen component wave function which contain Lorentz covariant constituent potentials that are initially undetermined. An exact Pauli reduction leads to a second order relativistic Schroedinger-like equation for a reduced eight component wave function determined by an effective interaction -- the quasipotential. We first determine perturbatively to lowest order the relativistic quasipotential for the Schroedinger-like equation by comparing that form with one derived from the Bethe-Salpeter equation. Insertion of this perturbative information into the minimal interaction structures of the two-body Dirac equations then completely determines their interaction structures. Then we give a procedure for constructing the full sixteen component solution to our coupled first-order Dirac equations from a solution of the second order equation for the reduced wave function. Next, we show that a perturbative treatment of these equations yields the standard spectral results for QED and related interactions.