Quantum fluctuations in the bag and nucleon observables

A time-dependent, perturbative formalism is developed to describe the effect of quantum fluctuations of the quark fields inside a hadronic bag on physical observables. This formalism differs from previous ones in that (1) all contributions to second order in the QCD coupling constant are generated systematically and included in the numerical treatment; (2) the intermediate sums are carried out over a full set of states consistent with parity and SU(2) coupling rules. After removing the logarithmic divergences arising from the intermediate state sums in the 1-body terms and applying a finite renormalization, the second order fluctuation corrections to several proton and neutron observables are computed. The results obtained are significantly different from those obtained in earlier calculations. In no case considered are the calculated corrections sufficient to account for existing discrepancies between empirical values and lower order hadronic bag results for nucleon observables