Dyson series

In scattering theory, a part of mathematical physics, the Dyson series, formulated by Freeman Dyson, is a perturbative series where each term is represented by Feynman diagrams. This series diverges asymptotically, but in quantum electrodynamics (QED) at the second order the difference from experimental data is in the order of 10−10. This close agreement holds because the coupling constant (also known as the fine structure constant) of QED is much less than 1. Notice that in this article Planck units are used, so that ħ = 1 (where ħ is the reduced Planck constant). In scattering theory, a part of mathematical physics, the Dyson series, formulated by Freeman Dyson, is a perturbative series where each term is represented by Feynman diagrams. This series diverges asymptotically, but in quantum electrodynamics (QED) at the second order the difference from experimental data is in the order of 10−10. This close agreement holds because the coupling constant (also known as the fine structure constant) of QED is much less than 1. Notice that in this article Planck units are used, so that ħ = 1 (where ħ is the reduced Planck constant). Suppose that we have a Hamiltonian H, which we split into a free part H0 and an interacting part V, i.e. H = H0 + V. We will work in the interaction picture here and assume units such that the reduced Planck constant ħ is 1. In the interaction picture, the evolution operator U defined by the equation is called the Dyson operator.