Two-body bound states & the Bethe-Salpeter equation

摘要

The Bethe-Salpeter formalism is used to study two-body bound states within a scalar theory: two scalar fields interacting via the exchange of a third massless scalar field. The Schwinger-Dyson equation is derived using functional and diagrammatic techniques, and the Bethe-Salpeter equation is obtained in an analogous way, showing it to be a two-particle generalization of the Schwinger-Dyson equation. The authors also present a numerical method for solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation without three-dimensional reduction. The ground and first excited state masses and wavefunctions are computed within the ladder approximation and space-like form factors are calculated.