An all-loop result for the strong magnetic field limit of the Heisenberg-Euler effective Lagrangian

Abstract

We provide an explicit expression for the strong magnetic field limit of the Heisenberg-Euler effective Lagrangian for both scalar and spinor quantum electrodynamics. To this end, we show that the strong magnetic field behavior is fully determined by one-particle reducible contributions discovered only recently. The latter can efficiently be constructed in an essentially algebraic procedure from lower-order one-particle reducible diagrams. Remarkably, the leading strong magnetic field behavior of the all-loop Heisenberg-Euler effective Lagrangian only requires input from the one-loop Lagrangian. Our result revises previous findings based exclusively on one-particle irreducible contributions. In addition we briefly discuss the strong electric field limit and comment on external field QED in the large $N$ limit.

Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures; v2: differs from previous and published versions, correctly accounts for a factor of 1/2 in the 1PR contributions