Fall to the centre in atom traps and point-particle EFT for absorptive systems

Polarizable atoms interacting with a charged wire do so through an inverse-square potential, V = −g/r2. This system is known to realize scale invariance in a nontrivial way and to be subject to ambiguities associated with the choice of boundary condition at the origin, often termed the problem of ‘fall to the center’. Point-particle effective field theory (PPEFT) provides a systematic framework for determining the boundary condition in terms of …