Non-perturbative Calculation of the Positronium Mass Spectrum in Basis Light-Front Quantization

Abstract

We report on recent improvements to our non-perturbative calculation of the positronium spectrum. Our Hamiltonian is a two-body effective interaction which incorporates one-photon exchange terms, but neglects fermion self-energy effects. This effective Hamiltonian is diagonalized numerically in a harmonic oscillator basis at strong coupling ($\alpha =0.3$) to obtain the mass eigenvalues. We find that the mass spectrum compares favorably to the Bohr spectrum of non-relativistic quantum mechanics evaluated at this unphysical coupling.

Comments: Presented at LightCone 2014, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA