High-precision calculation of the 4-loop QED contribution to the slope of the Dirac form factor

Abstract

We have evaluated with 1100 digits of precision the contribution of all the 891 mass-independent four-loop Feynman diagrams contributing to the slope of the Dirac form factor in QED. The total 4-loop contribution is $m^2{F}_1^{(4{)}^{\prime }}(0)=\mathrm{0.886545673946443145836821730610315359390424032660064745...}{\left(\frac{\alpha }{\pi }\right)}^4$. We have fit a semi-analytical expression to the numerical value. The expression contains harmonic polylogarithms of argument $e^{\frac{i\pi }{3}}$, $e^{\frac{2i\pi }{3}}$, $e^{\frac{i\pi }{2}}$, one-dimensional integrals of products of complete elliptic integrals and six finite parts of master integrals, evaluated up to 4800 digits. I show the correction on the shift of the energy levels of the hydrogen atom due to the slope.

Comments: 12 pages, 3 figures and 3 tables; v2: a few misprints corrected, version formatted to be published on Physics Letters B