Exploring magnetic fluctuation effects in QED gauge fields: Implications for mass generation

In this work, we calculate the one-loop contribution to the polarization tensor for photons (and gluons) in the presence of a classical background magnetic field with white-noise stochastic fluctuations. The magnetic field fluctuations are incorporated into the fermion propagator in a quasiparticle picture, which we developed in previous works using the . By focusing on the strong-field limit, here we explicitly calculate the polarization tensor. Our results reveal that it does not satisfy the transversality conditions outlined by the Ward identity, thus breaking the <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mi>U</a:mi><a:mo stretchy="false">(</a:mo><a:mn>1</a:mn><a:mo stretchy="false">)</a:mo></a:math> symmetry. As a consequence, in the limit of vanishing photon four-momenta, the tensor coefficients indicate the emergence of an effective magnetic mass induced on photons (and gluons) by these stochastic fluctuations, leading to the interpretation of a dispersive medium with a noise-dependent index of refraction. Published by the American Physical Society 2024