Exponentially damped Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian for the description of positronium decay and other high energy processes

Abstract

The conventional explanation for the 1·022 MeV decay of positronium in terms of the annihilation of an electron and its antiparticle is questioned because of the impossibility of proving experimentally that matter actually disappears. Recent work has provided evidence that photons are not destroyed in radiative absorption, for example, but rather attain an undetectable (E = hv = 0) state. Questioning the creation-annihilation hypothesis in the case of positronium decay leads to the construction of an exponentially damped Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian which, when employed in a Schrödinger equation, gives an e⁺e^- ground state with a binding energy of 1·022 MeV. The analogous treatment does not produce any (unobserved) states of similarly low energy for the hydrogen atom but, by virtue of a simple scaling theorem, it does lead to a maximal proton-antiproton binding energy of 1·876 GeV, which is exactly m _p/m _e times larger than for e⁺e^-. Arguments are presented to identify the resulting tightly bound e⁺e^- system with the photon itself, since both are ascribed a zero rest mass. The above Hamiltonian is identified with the unified electroweak interaction, especially since it also proves applicable to the description of neutrino processes. It is pointed out that the analogous ⫨ binary systems would be subject to predissociation into free neutrinos and antineutrinos, however, unlike their much more strongly bound e⁺e^- and p⁺p^- counterparts. This observation suggests a different explanation for the well known solar neutrino problem than the flavour-oscillation theory which was proposed earlier.