LIGHT-FRONT HAMILTONIAN AND PATH INTEGRAL QUANTIZATION OF VECTOR SCHWINGER MODEL WITH A PHOTON MASS TERM

Vector Schwinger model with a mass term for the photon, describing 2D electrodynamics with massless fermions, studied by us recently [U. Kulshreshtha, Mod. Phys. Lett. A22, 2993 (2007); U. Kulshreshtha and D. S. Kulshreshtha, Int. J. Mod. Phys. A22, 6183 (2007); U. Kulshreshtha, PoS LC2008, 008 (2008)], represents a new class of models. This theory becomes gauge-invariant when studied on the light-front. This is in contrast to the instant-form theory which is gauge-non-invariant. In this work, we study the light-front Hamiltonian and path integral quantization of this theory under appropriate light-cone gauge-fixing. The discretized light-cone quantization of the theory where we wish to make contact with the experimentally observational aspects of the theory would be presented in a separate paper.