Asymptotic symmetries of Yang-Mills theory

By Andrew Strominger. 2013

387 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractAsymptotic symmetries at future null infinity (ℐ$$ \mathrm{\mathcal{I}} $$+) of Minkowski space for electrodynamics with massless charged fields, as well as nonabelian gauge theories with gauge group G, are considered at the semiclassical level. The possibility of charge/color flux through ℐ$$ \mathrm{\mathcal{I}} $$+ suggests the symmetry group is infinite-dimensional. It is conjectured that the symmetries include a G Kac-Moody symmetry whose generators are “large” gauge transformations which approach locally holomorphic functions on the conformal two-sphere at ℐ$$ \mathrm{\mathcal{I}} $$+ and are invariant under null translations. The Kac-Moody currents are constructed from the gauge field at the future boundary of ℐ$$ \mathrm{\mathcal{I}} $$+. The current Ward identities include Weinberg’s soft photon theorem and its colored extension.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c3ace96560b0a635736cc7cc1b7d1183ce73bda

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Andrew Strominger
2. Sabrina Pasterski
3. M. Pate
4. C. Cheung
5. L. Mason
6. Shu-Heng Shao
7. Alok Laddha
8. Tim Adamo

Citations in the corpus

• 4D scattering amplitudes and asymptotic symmetries from 2D CFT (2016, result): “in agreement with [20] but not [22], which argued for a vanishing Kac-Moody level.”
• Asymptotic symmetries and subleading soft graviton theorem (2014, methodology): “For ξ a as in (2) with f = 0 the action is given by [10]: δVCAB = LVCAB − αCAB + αu∂uCAB.”
• 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].”
• 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].”
• Lectures on celestial amplitudes (2021, background): “The final ingredient is an insight by Strominger [7] that we can impose an antipodal matching condition across spatial infinity.”
• Lectures on the Infrared Structure of Gravity and Gauge Theory (2017, background): “What would we expect for the asymptotic symmetry group of electrodynamics? This question has been asked only in the past few years [10,11].”
• Gluon Amplitudes as 2d Conformal Correlators (2017, background): “This case is of special interest both because it has been shown that soft gluons generate a 2d current algebra [15, 16] and because of the plethora of beautiful results about these amplitudes in the momentum-space representation.”
• Soft sub-leading divergences in Yang-Mills amplitudes (2014, methodology): “The sub-leading divergences are proportional to the angular momentum operator just like in gravity, and might be derived by asymptotic methods as was done for the usual soft limit in [1].”
• 2D Kac-Moody symmetry of 4D Yang-Mills theory (2015, background): “In this section, we give our conventions for the asymptotic expansion around I (see [3] for more details), specify the gauge conditions and boundary conditions, and describe the residual large gauge symmetry.”
• Celestial amplitudes and conformal soft theorems (2019, background): “corresponding to a gauge transformation on the celestial sphere Sd with gauge parameter ǫ·ζ/k ·ζ [38]. Such large gauge transformations on Sd are well-known asymptotic symmetries of Yang-Mills theory [50]. A similar story holds for conformally soft graviton vertex operators. Translating into I-adapt”
• On BMS invariance of gravitational scattering (2013, result): “Our discussion parallels recent analyses of the asymptotic/infrared structure of massless QED and Yang-Mills theory appearing in [11, 12, 13].”
• Celestial Holography (2021, background): “The celestial holography program is rooted in the interesting observation [30,31] that the perturbative gravitational S-matrix provides additional guidance in addressing this question.”