FIRST INDICATION OF QED

WEISSKOPF, VICTOR FREDERICK

Uber die Selbstenergie des Elektrons.

Berlin, Springer, 1934. 8vo. Bound in contemporary half cloth with gilt lettering, In "Zeitschrift für Physik", Band 89, 1934. Entire issue offered. Two stamps to title page, otherwise fine. Pp. 27-39. [Entire volume : VIII, 836 pp.].

First appearance of Weisskopf seminal paper in which he for the very first time gave an indication that QED (Quantum electro dynamics) might be made a tractable theory.
"At Pauli's suggestion [Weisskopf] computed the electron's self-energy in perturbation theory, including both electrons and positrons. In doing this calculation [Weisskopf] made a sign error, which was quickly pointed out by Wendell Furry; when this was taken into account, the result was a self-energy that diverged logarithmically as the electron's radius a tended to zero (1934). This was an astonishing result: Classical electrodynamics was long known to produce a linear divergence, and the one-particle version of QED, already mentioned, yielded a quadratically divergent self-energy. The "soft" logarithmic divergence of QED with electrons and positrons was a first indication that QED might be made a tractable theory" (Jackson, Victor Frederick Weisskopf).

Later Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonago shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics [QED], with deep ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particels".

Order-nr.: 49053