Towards relativistic atomic physics. Part 1. The rest-frame instant form of dynamics and a canonical transformation for a system of charged particles plus the electromagnetic field

A complete exposition of the rest-frame instant form of dynamics for arbitrary isolated systems (particles, fields, strings, fluids) admitting a Lagrangian description is given. The starting point is the parametrized Minkowski theory describing the system in arbitrary admissible noninertial frames in Minkowski space-time, which allows one to define the energy-momentum tensor of the system and to show the independence of the description from the clock synchronization convention and from the choice of the 3-coordinates. The restriction to the inertial rest frame, centered on the inertial observer having the Fokker-Pryce center-of-inertia world-line, and the study of relativistic collective variables replacing the nonrelativistic center of mass lead to the description of the isolated system as a decoupled globally defined noncovariant canonical external center of mass carrying a pole-dipole structure (the invariant mass M and the rest spin S¯ of the system) and an external realization of the Poincare group. Mc and S¯ are the energy and angular momentum of a unfaithful internal realization of the Poincare group built with the energy-momentum tensor of the system and acting inside the instantaneous Wigner 3-spaces where all the 3-vectors are Wigner covariant. The vanishing of the internal 3-momentum and of the internal Lorentz boosts eliminate the internal 3-center of mass inside the Wigner 3-spaces, so that at the end the isolated system is described only by Wigner-covariant canonical internal relative variables. Then an isolated system of positive-energy charged scalar articles with mutual Coulomb interaction plus a transverse electromagnetic field in the radiation gauge is investigated as a classical background for defining relativistic atomic physics. The electric charges of the particles are Grassmann-valued to regularize the self-energies. The external and internal realizations of the Poincare algebra in the rest-frame instant form of dynamics are found. This allows one to define explicitly the rest-frame conditions and their gauge-fixings (needed for the elimination of the internal 3-center of mass) for this isolated system. It is shown that there is a canonical transformation that allows one to describe the isolated system as a set of Coulomb-dressed charged particles interacting through a Coulomb plus Darwin potential plus a free transverse radiation field: these two subsystems are not mutually interacting (the internal Poincare generators are a direct sum of the two components) and are interconnected only by the rest-frame conditions and the elimination of the internal 3-center of mass. Therefore, in this framework with a fixed number of particles there is a way out from the Haag theorem, at least at the classical level. (author)