Journey to the Bound States

This book is a graduate-level self-study guide of bound states in elementary particle physics and consequently in the standard model. The author first recalls the usual quantum electrodynamics (QED) approach to atoms in terms of Feynman diagrams, which assume free states at asymptotic times. Motivated by general principles and data, he then develops a novel method based on a Fock expansion of bound states in temporal gauge. The properties of relativistic bound states are discussed for Dirac states, atoms in motion, QED in D=1+1 dimensions, and hadrons in quantum chromodynamics (including color confinement). This book provides complementary material for quantum field theory courses and is accessible for graduate students and more senior researchers.

Paul Hoyer is Professor Emeritus of particle physics at the University of Helsinki, where he received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1973. During his career, he worked at CERN (Switzerland), the University of Oxford (UK), Stony Brook University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA), and at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) in Copenhagen (Denmark). During his tenure at Helsinki University from 1981, he served as Director of NORDITA in Copenhagen 1994–2002. He has been a member and chair of the Board of the European Centre ECT* in Trento (Italy) and of the CP3-Origins Centre at the University of Southern Denmark. He has served on the Executive Committee of the European Physical Society and as a chair of the PANDA Experiment Theory Advisory Group at FAIR (Germany). His research has focused on the strong interactions, striving to describe data and explain phenomenology in terms of the underlying theory of quantum chromodynamics.