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Michael Del Grosso

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Del Grosso.

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Torsional Regularization of Self-Energy and Bare Mass of Electron

In the presence of spacetime torsion, the momentum components do not commute; therefore, in quantum field theory, summation over the momentum eigenvalues will replace integration over the momentum. In the Einstein--Cartan theory of gravity, in which torsion is coupled to spin, the separation between the eigenvalues increases with the magnitude of the momentum. Consequently, this replacement regularizes divergent integrals in Feynman diagrams with loops by turning them into convergent sums. In this article, we apply torsional regularization to the self-energy of a charged lepton in quantum electrodynamics. We show that torsion eliminates the ultraviolet divergence of the standard self-energy. We also show that the infrared divergence is absent. In the end, we calculate the finite bare masses of the electron, muon, and tau lepton: $0.4329\,\mbox{MeV}$, $90.95\,\mbox{MeV}$, and $1543\,\mbox{MeV}$, respectively. These values constitute about $85\%$ of the observed, re-normalized masses.

hep-th

The Origin of the Born Rule from Spacetime Averaging

The Born rule postulates that the probability of measurement in quantum mechanics is related to the squared modulus of the wave function $ψ$. We rearrange the equation for energy eigenfunctions to define the energy as the real part of $\hat{E}ψ/ψ$. For an eigenstate, this definition gives a constant energy eigenvalue. For a general wave function, the energy fluctuates in space and time. We consider a particle in a one-dimensional square well potential in a superposition of two states and average the energy over space and time. We show that, for most cases, such an energy expectation value differs by only a few percent from that calculated using the Born rule. This difference is consistent with experimental tests of the expectation value and suggests that the Born rule may be an approximation of spacetime averaging.

quant-ph