Construction of the Pauli-Villars-regulated Dirac vacuum in electromagnetic fields (Q1949325)

There are several methods for regularizing the divergent Feynman integrals. One is the Pauli-Villars regularization which adds fictitious particles to modify propagators. In QED it provides regularization of the photon propagator. However, propagator regularization is less convenient in non-abelian gauge theories. Generally speaking, dimensional regularization is favored though it is very cumbersome in the case of QED. The present article assumes the existence of a small external electromagnetic source, and so the vacuum becomes a quantum fluctuating nonlinear polarizable medium. The authors construct solutions of the classical time-independent Maxwell equations in the Dirac vacuum. These equations get quantum corrections which are nonlocal and nonlinear. The vacuum polarization coincides with that of QED to first order.