On the Triviality of Textbook Quantum Electrodynamics

Question

Referee this paper: arXiv:hep-lat/0009029v2 by S. Kim, J. B. Kogut, M.-P. Lombardo

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By adding a small, irrelevant four fermi interaction to the action of lattice Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the theory can be simulated with massless quarks in a vacuum free of lattice monopoles. This allows an ab initio high precision, controlled study of the existence of "textbook" Quantum Electrodynamics with several species of fermions. The lattice theory possesses a second order chiral phase transition which we show is logarithmically trivial. The logarithms of triviality, which modify mean field scaling laws, are pinpointed in several observables. The result supports Landau's contention that perturbative QED suffers from complete screening and would have a vanishing fine structure constant in the absence of a cutoff.

Comments

I don't understand how an "irrelevant trick" for lattice computation might lead to solid conclusions on mean field theories...

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@igael: ''irrelevant term'' has a technical meaning, roughly equivalent to ''nonrenormalizable term''.

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TY, however it is still a computational trick for a lattice better fit... Such conclusions need more arguments and perhaps more details on this new lecture of the mean fields theory