An unknown story: Majorana and the Pauli-Weisskopf scalar electrodynamics

An account is given of an interesting but unknown theory by Majorana regarding scalar quantum electrodynamics, elaborated several years before the known Pauli-Weisskopf theory. Theoretical calculations and their interpretation are given in detail, together with a general historical discussion of the main steps towards the building of a quantum field theory for electrodynamics. A possible peculiar application to nuclear constitution, as conceived around 1930, considered by Majorana is as well discussed.Comment: Latex, amsart, 20 pages, 2 figures; to be published in Annalen der Physi

Vector Currents of Massive Neutrinos of an Electroweak Nature

The mass of an electroweakly interacting neutrino consists of the electric and weak parts responsible for the existence of its charge, charge radius, and magnetic moment. Such connections explain the formation of paraneutrinos, for example, at the polarized neutrino electroweak scattering by spinless nuclei. We derive the structural equations that relate the self-components of mass to charge, charge radius, and magnetic moment of each neutrino as a consequence of unification of fermions of a definite flavor. They indicate the availability of neutrino universality and require following its logic in a constancy law dependence of the size implied from the multiplication of a weak mass of neutrino by its electric mass. According to this principle, all Dirac neutrinos of a vector nature, regardless of the difference in their masses, have the same charge, an identical charge radius, as well as an equal magnetic moment. Thereby, the possibility appears of establishing the laboratory limits of weak masses of the investigated types of neutrinos. Finding estimates show clearly that the earlier measured properties of these particles may testify in favor of the unified mass structure of their interaction with any of the corresponding types of gauge fields.Comment: 14 pages, LaTex, Published version in CJ

Local Casimir Effect for a Scalar Field in Presence of a Point Impurity

The Casimir effect for a scalar field in presence of delta-type potentials has been investigated for a long time in the case of surface delta functions, modelling semi-transparent boundaries. More recently Albeverio, Cacciapuoti, Cognola, Spreafico and Zerbini [9,10,51] have considered some configurations involving delta-type potentials concentrated at points of $\mathbb{R}^3$; in particular, the case with an isolated point singularity at the origin can be formulated as a field theory on $\mathbb{R}^3\setminus \{\mathbf{0}\}$, with self-adjoint boundary conditions at the origin for the Laplacian. However, the above authors have discussed only global aspects of the Casimir effect, focusing their attention on the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of the total energy. In the present paper we analyze the local Casimir effect with a point delta-type potential, computing the renormalized VEV of the stress-energy tensor at any point of $\mathbb{R}^3\setminus \{\mathbf{0}\}$; to this purpose we follow the zeta regularization approach, in the formulation already employed for different configurations in previous works of ours (see [29-31] and references therein).Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures; the final version accepted for publication. In the initial part of the paper, possible text overlaps with our previous works arXiv:1104.4330, arXiv:1505.00711, arXiv:1505.01044, arXiv:1505.01651, arXiv:1505.03276. These overlaps aim to make the present paper self-contained, and do not involve the main result