The self-consistent chiral soliton of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model including the ω, ρ and a 1 (axial-) vector meson fields besides the chiral angle is investigated. The resulting energy spectrum of the one particle Dirac Hamiltonian is strongly distorted leading to a polarized Dirac sea which carries the complete baryon number. This supports Witten's conjecture that baryons can be described as topological solitons. The exploration of the isoscalar mean squared radius of the nucleon exhibits that the repulsive character of the isoscalar vector field ω as well as the attractive features of the (axial-) vector mesons ρ and a 1 are reproduced in the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. The axial charge of the nucleon g A comes out far too small. This can be understood as an artifact of the proper time regularization prescription. † Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under contract Re 856/2-1. 1

We develop a covariant approach to describe the low-lying scalar, pseudoscalar, vector and axialvector mesons as quark-antiquark bound states. This approach is based on an effective interaction modeling of the nonperturbative structure of the gluon propagator that enters the quark Schwinger-Dyson and meson Bethe-Salpeter equations. We consistently treat these integral equations by precisely implementing the quark propagator functions that solve the Schwinger-Dyson equations into the Bethe-Salpeter equations in the relevant kinematical region. We extract the meson masses and compute the pion and kaon decay constants. We obtain a quantitatively correct description for pions, kaons and vector mesons while the calculated spectra of scalar and axialvector mesons suggest that their structure is more complex than being quark-antiquark bound states.

The Casimir problem is usually posed as the response of a fluctuating quantum field to externally imposed boundary conditions. In reality, however, no interaction is strong enough to enforce a boundary condition on all frequencies of a fluctuating field. We construct a more physical model of the situation by coupling the fluctuating field to a smooth background potential that implements the boundary condition in a certain limit. To study this problem, we develop general new methods to compute renormalized one-loop quantum energies and energy densities. We use analytic properties of scattering data to compute Green's functions in time-independent background fields at imaginary momenta. Our calculational method is particularly useful for numerical studies of singular limits because it avoids terms that oscillate or require cancellation of exponentially growing and decaying factors. To renormalize, we identify potentially divergent contributions to the Casimir energy with low orders in the Born series to the Green's function. We subtract these contributions and add back the corresponding Feynman diagrams, which we combine with counterterms fixed by imposing standard renormalization conditions on low-order Green's functions. The resulting Casimir energy and energy density are finite functionals for smooth background potentials. In general, however, the Casimir energy diverges in the boundary condition limit. This divergence is real and reflects the infinite energy needed to constrain a fluctuating field on all energy scales; renormalizable quantum field theories have no place for ad hoc surface counterterms. We apply our methods to simple examples to illustrate cases where these subtleties invalidate the conclusions of the boundary condition approach.

Casimir forces are conventionally computed by analyzing the effects of boundary conditions on a fluctuating quantum field. Although this analysis provides a clean and calculationally tractable idealization, it does not always accurately capture the characteristics of real materials, which cannot constrain the modes of the fluctuating field at all energies. We study the vacuum polarization energy of renormalizable, continuum quantum field theory in the presence of a background field, designed to impose a Dirichlet boundary condition in a particular limit. We show that in two and three space dimensions, as a background field becomes concentrated on the surface on which the Dirichlet boundary condition would eventually hold, the Casimir energy diverges. This result implies that the energy depends in detail on the properties of the material, which are not captured by the idealized boundary conditions. This divergence does not affect the force between rigid bodies, but it does invalidate calculations of Casimir stresses based on idealized boundary conditions.