arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Horace W. Crater.
Dirac's relativistic constraint dynamics have been successfully applied to obtain a covariant nonperturbative description of QED and QCD bound states. We use this formalism to describe a microscopic theory of meson-meson scattering as a relativistic generalization of the nonrelativistic quark-interchange model developed by Barnes and Swanson.
Hadrons produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions can suppress the production of J/psi and other charmonium states by charmonium spontaneous dissociation as the hot hadronic environment alters the interaction between the charm quark and charm antiquark. Furthermore, hadrons can thermalize a charmonium to excite it to higher charmonium states which subsequently dissociate spontaneously. They can also collide with a charmonium to lead to its prompt dissociation into an open charm pair.
We examine three different ways a heavy quarkonium can dissociate at temperatures below the quark-gluon plasma phase transition temperature T_c: spontaneous dissociation, dissociation by thermalization, and dissociation by collision with hadrons. We evaluate the cross sections for the dissociation of J/psi and Upsilon in collision with pion as a function of temperature, using the quark-interchange model of Barnes and Swanson. We also evaluate the dissociation temperatures for various quarkonia, and the fraction of quarkonium lying above the dissociation threshold as a function of temperature, using an interquark potential inferred from lattice gauge calculations.
In the non-relativistic description of the reaction of composite particles, the reaction matrix is independent of the choice of post or prior forms for the interaction. We generalize this post-prior equivalence to the relativistic reaction of composite particles by using Dirac's constraint dynamics to describe the bound states and the reaction process.
We use Dirac's constraint dynamics to obtain a Hamiltonian formulation of the relativistic N-body problem in a separable two-body basis in which the particles interact pair-wise through scalar and vector interactions. The resultant N-body Hamiltonian is relativistically covariant. It can be easily separated in terms of the center-of-mass and the relative motion of any two-body subsystem. It can also be separated into an unperturbed Hamiltonian with a residual interaction. In a system of two-body composite particles, the solutions of the unperturbed Hamiltonian are relativistic two-body internal states, each of which can be obtained by solving a relativistic Schrödinger-like equation. The resultant two-body wave functions can be used as basis states to evaluate reaction matrix elements in the general N-body problem. We prove a relativistic version of the post-prior equivalence which guarantees a unique evaluation of the reaction matrix element, independent of the ways of separating the Hamiltonian into unperturbed and residual interactions. Since an arbitrary reaction matrix element involves composite particles in motion, we show explicitly how such matrix elements can be evaluated in terms of the wave functions of the composite particles and the relevant Lorentz transformations.
We review a little-known treatment of the relativistic two-body bound-state problem - that provided by Two-Body Dirac Equations obtained from constraint dynamics. We describe some of its more important results, its relation to older formulations and to quantum field theory. We list a number of features crucial for the success of such a formulation, many of which are missing from other methods; we show how the treatment provided by Two-Body Dirac Equations encompasses each of them.
G.Breit's original paper of 1929 postulates the Breit equation as a correction to an earlier defective equation due to Eddington and Gaunt, containing a form of interaction suggested by Heisenberg and Pauli. We observe that manifestly covariant electromagnetic Two-Body Dirac equations previously obtained by us in the framework of Relativistic Constraint Mechanics reproduce the spectral results of the Breit equation but through an interaction structure that contains that of Eddington and Gaunt. By repeating for our equation the analysis that Breit used to demonstrate the superiority of his equation to that of Eddington and Gaunt, we show that the historically unfamiliar interaction structures of Two-Body Dirac equations (in Breit-like form) are just what is needed to correct the covariant Eddington Gaunt equation without resorting to Breit's version of retardation.
We examine the relation between two approaches to the quantum relativistic two-body problem: (1) the Breit equation, and (2) the two-body Dirac equations derived from constraint dynamics. The Breit equation is known to be pathological when singularities appear at finite separations $r$ in the reduced set of coupled equations for attractive potentials even when the potentials themselves are not singular there. They then give rise to unphysical bound states and resonances. In contrast, the two-body Dirac equations of constraint dynamics do not have these pathologies in many nonperturbative treatments. To understand these marked differences, we first express these contraint equations in a hyperbolic form. These coupled equations are then re-cast into two equivalent equations: (1) a covariant Breit-like equation with potentials that are exponential functions of certain ``generator'' functions, and (2) a covariant orthogonality constraint on the relative momentum. This reduction enables us to show in a transparent way that finite-$r$ singularities do not appear as long as the the exponential structure is not tampered with and the exponential generators of the interaction are themselves nonsingular for finite $r$. These Dirac or Breit equations, free of the structural singularities which plague the usual Breit equation, can then be used safely under all circumstances, encompassing numerous applications in the fields of particle, nuclear, and atomic physics which involve highly relativistic and strong binding configurations.