Speaker
Description
Millikan's famous experiment revealed a contradiction with Maxwell's
electrodynamics, which became known as the "4/3 problem" and the
"radiation reaction problem". From today's perspective, these issues
seem to have been insufficiently understood. The actual origin of the
problems lies in the instability of the classical electron.
Historical approaches to solving the 4/3 problem require more than
three degrees of freedom. In a soliton model, only three field degrees
of freedom are required to stabilize a purely electrodynamic electron,
as was demonstrated 25 years ago but has largely gone unnoticed until
now. Precursors to this model are Dirac's magnetic monopoles and their
non-Abelian formulation by Wu-Yang. It is shown how solitons with a
size of the classical electron radius can reproduce the
electromagnetic cross sections of electrons in Compton, Möller, and
Bhabha scattering in agreement with the results of QFT, when the
Lorentz contraction is taken into account.