Infrared divergences in QED revisited
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Publication Date
2017-10-15Journal Title
Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
ISSN
1550-2368
Publisher
American Physical Society
Volume
96
Issue
8
Number
085002
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
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Kapec, D., Perry, M., Raclariu, A., & Strominger, A. (2017). Infrared divergences in QED revisited. Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, 96 (8. 085002)https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.96.085002
Abstract
Recently, it has been shown that the vacuum state in QED is infinitely degenerate. Moreover, a transition
among the degenerate vacua is induced in any nontrivial scattering process and determined from the associated
soft factor. Conventional computations of scattering amplitudes in QED do not account for this vacuum
degeneracy and therefore always give zero. This vanishing of all conventional QED amplitudes is usually
attributed to infrared divergences. Here, we show that if these vacuum transitions are properly accounted for, the
resulting amplitudes are nonzero and infrared finite. Our construction of finite amplitudes is mathematically
equivalent to, and amounts to a physical reinterpretation of, the 1970 construction of Faddeev and Kulish
Sponsorship
STFC (ST/P000681/1)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.96.085002
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/315108
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