Published June 15, 2024 | Published
Journal Article Open

On-shell derivation of the soft effective action in Abelian gauge theories

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We derive the soft effective action in (𝑑+2)-dimensional Abelian gauge theories from the on-shell action obeying Neumann boundary conditions at timelike and null infinity and Dirichlet boundary conditions at spatial infinity. This allows us to identify the on-shell degrees of freedom on the boundary with the soft modes living on the celestial sphere. Following the work of Donnelly and Wall, this suggests that we can interpret soft modes as entanglement edge modes on the celestial sphere and study entanglement properties of soft modes in Abelian gauge theories.

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Funding

Funded by SCOAP3.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Sangmin Choi, Laurent Freidel, Per Kraus, Andrea Puhm, Ana-Maria Raclariu, Antony Speranza, and Andrew Strominger for useful conversations. T. H., A. S., and K. Z. are supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation “Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity” collaboration Grant No. 2021-2817, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632, and the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. P. M. is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 852386). The work of K. Z. is also supported by a Simons Investigator award.

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Additional details

Created:
June 25, 2024
Modified:
June 25, 2024