Self-Interaction of Neutrons and Protons

Abstract

IT is known that, starting with Fermi's expression for the coupling between a heavy nuclear particle and the field of electrons and neutrinos, we get in the second approximation the law for interaction between proton and neutron¹. This law: (g is Fermi's constant, the best choice for s is 3) gives a divergent result at r 0, which shows the impossibility of constructing a point model of a heavy particle, just as the classical and quantum electrodynamics both lead to infinite self-interaction of a point charged particle on Coulomb's formula. The only reasonable method so far proposed to remove this difficulty of classical electrodynamics is the nonlinear generalization of Maxwell's equations developed by Mie and Born², who introduced a new characteristic length (the analogue of the radius of the electron).