Nonperturbative dressing of nucleons by mesons

Abstract

Following Feynman's treatment of the polaron problem we present an approximate non-perturbative method of dressing nucleons by scalar and vector mesons: after integrating out the meson fields in the path integral we perform a variational calculation for the effective two-time action of the nucleon by using the same ansatz as Feynman did for the polaron. New features arise from the vector mesons which lead to velocity-dependent terms. We obtain numerical results for the radius and the mean number of the mesons of the dressed particle and derive the effective action in the A nucleon case. © 1994 Springer-Verlag.