New symmetries of massless QED

By T. He, P. Mitra, Achilleas P. Porfyriadis, Andrew Strominger. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2014

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An infinite number of physically nontrivial symmetries are found for abelian gauge theories with massless charged particles. They are generated by large U(1) gauge transformations that asymptotically approach an arbitrary function εzz¯\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$ \varepsilon \left(z,\overline{z}\right) $$\end{document} on the conformal sphere at future null infinity () but are independent of the retarded time. The value of ε at past null infinity () is determined from that on by the condition that it take the same value at either end of any light ray crossing Minkowski space. The ε ≠ constant symmetries are spontaneously broken in the usual vacuum. The associated Goldstone modes are zero-momentum photons and comprise a U(1) boson living on the conformal sphere. The Ward identity associated with this asymptotic symmetry is shown to be the abelian soft photon theorem.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0573d1b4bc1a1957590b65aa43ca8118e49e8dcf

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Citations in the corpus

Higher-Dimensional Supertranslations and Weinberg's Soft Graviton Theorem (2015, background): “Further investigations along these lines have established a robust and detailed correspondence between soft theorems for gauge theory/gravity scattering amplitudes and Ward identities for extended asymptotic symmetry groups [7, 8, 10–22].”
Asymptotic symmetries and electromagnetic memory (2015, methodology): “4 Large U(1) Symmetry In this section, we review the derivation of the asymptotic U(1) gauge symmetry found in [10] and discuss the second step in setting the boundary conditions for an S-matrix symmetry.”
Lectures on the Infrared Structure of Gravity and Gauge Theory (2017, background): “We begin by separating out the constant (u-independent) part of A z [11, 12], A z (u, z, z̄) = Âz(u, z, z̄) + ∂zφ(z, z̄) , (2.”
4D scattering amplitudes and asymptotic symmetries from 2D CFT (2016, result): “(56) This fact dovetails beautifully with the results of [20, 21, 23, 24], which argued that there is physical significance to large gauge transformations that do not vanish at the boundary of Mink4.”
Symmetries and charges of general relativity at null boundaries (2018, background): “As discussed in the introduction, in the past few years an infinite set of new global conservation laws in gauge theories have been discovered, associated with “large” gauge transformations which are not trivial at infinity [4, 7].”
Subleading soft photons and large gauge transformations (2016, neutral): “We assume the standard power series expansion (see for instance [5]):”
Flat holography: aspects of the dual field theory (2016, background): “The above triangle of relations is not only true for gravity, but for any field theory and in particular, similar relations for electrodynamics have been discussed in [14].”
Local subsystems in gauge theory and gravity (2016, background): “Much recent work has focused on asymptotic symmetries of Yang-Mills theories [59, 60] and gravity [61, 62].”
Bridging Carrollian and celestial holography (2022, methodology): “The soft photon theorem can be rewritten as a U(1) Kac-Moody Ward identity [69,110,126]”
Soft Hair on Black Holes. (2016, background): “8) is a strong operator equality whose matrix elements are the soft photon theorem [41, 42].”
Asymptotic symmetries of QED and Weinberg’s soft photon theorem (2015, methodology): “J H E P 0 7 ( 2 0 1 5 ) 1 1 5 as in the massless case [5, 8].”