Finite-Volume Electromagnetic Corrections to the Masses of Mesons, Baryons and Nuclei

Abstract

Now that Lattice QCD calculations are beginning to include QED, it is important to better understand how hadronic properties are modified by finite-volume QED effects. They are known to exhibit power-law scaling with volume, in contrast to the exponential behavior of finite-volume strong interaction effects. We use non-relativistic effective field theories describing the low-momentum behavior of hadrons to determine the finite-volume QED corrections to the masses of mesons, baryons and nuclei out to O(1/L^4) in a volume expansion, where L is the spatial extent of the cubic volume. This generalizes the previously determined expansion for mesons, and extends it by two orders in 1/L to include contributions from the charge radius, magnetic moment and polarizabilities of the hadron. We make an observation about direct calculations of the muon g-2 in a finite volume.

Comments: 16 pages, 11 figures. v2: matches the published version. Eqs. (18) and (19) are updated to include a missing contribution at O(1/L^4). The main results and the conclusion are unchanged