Friday 20 December 2019

quantum field theory - Renormalized mass



I am reading Schwarz QFT and I reached the mass renormalization part. So he introduces, after renormalization, a physical mass, defined as the pole of the renormalized propagator, and a renormalized mass which can be the physical mass, but can also take other values, depending on the subtraction schemes used. Are these masses, other than the physical one, observable in any way experimentally, or are they just ways to do the math easier (using minimal subtraction instead of on-shell scheme, for example)?


Also, in the case of charge renormalization, the explanation was that due to the vacuum polarization, the closer you are to the charge, the more you see of it, so the charge of the particle increases with the momentum you are testing the particle with. However, I am not sure I understand, from a physical point of view, why do you need to renormalize the mass. Is this physical mass (defined as the pole of the renormalized propagator) the same no matter how close you get, or it also changes with energy? And if it changes, what is shielding it at big distances?




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