Existence of a stable polarized vacuum in the Bogoliubov-Dirac-Fock approximation (Q2571145)

The authors mathematically carefully discuss the notion of ``vacuum polarization'' in the case of the presence of an external electrostatic potential. The authors consider the Bogoliubov-Dirac-Fock model that can be derived from no-photon QED. The corresponding energy takes the vacuum polarization into account and is bounded from below. It is shown that there exists a unique minimizer of this energy which is a solution of a self-consistent equation for the spectral projection operator onto the negative part of the energy spectrum of the Dirac equation with an electrostatic potential. For this the authors mathematically reformulate the issue into a fix-point problem that can be solved iteratively.