Renormalization of Hamiltonians

Abstract

This paper presents a new renormalization procedure for Hamiltonians such as those of light-front field theory. The bare Hamiltonian with an arbitrarily large, but finite cutoff, is transformed by a specially chosen similarity transformation. The similarity transformation has two desirable features. First, the transformed Hamiltonian is band diagonal: in particular, all matrix elements vanish which would otherwise have caused transitions with big energy jumps, such as from a state of bounded energy to a state with an energy of the order of the cutoff. At the same time, neither the similarity transformation nor the transformed Hamiltonian, computed in perturbation theory, contain vanishing or near-vanishing energy denominators. Instead, energy differences in denominators can be replaced by energy sums for purposes of order of magnitude estimates needed to determine cutoff dependences. These two properties make it possible to determine relatively easily the list of counterterms needed to obtain finite low energy results (such as for eigenvalues). A simple model Hamiltonian is discussed to illustrate the method.