Published November 25, 2024 | Published
Journal Article Open

Diamond of infrared equivalences in abelian gauge theories

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon University of Amsterdam
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Abstract

We demonstrate a tree-level equivalence between four distinct infrared objects in (d+2)-dimensional Abelian gauge theories. These are (i) the large gauge charge Qϵ where the function ϵ on the sphere parametrizing large gauge transformations is identified with the Goldstone mode θ of spontaneously broken large gauge symmetry; (ii) the soft effective action that captures the dynamics of the soft and Goldstone modes; (iii) the edge mode action with Neumann boundary conditions; and (iv) the Wilson line dressing of a scattering amplitude, including a novel dressing for soft photons, which have local charge distributions despite having vanishing global charge. The promotion of the large gauge parameter to the dynamical Goldstone and the novel dressing of soft gauge particles give rise to intriguing possibilities for the future study of infrared dynamics of gauge theories and gravity.

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. Funded by SCOAP3.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Laurent Freidel and Ana-Maria Raclariu for productive conversations, and Adam Ball for useful feedback regarding our preprint. We would especially like to thank Allic Sivaramakrishnan for collaborating in the early stages of this work. T. H. and K. Z. are supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation “Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity” collaboration grant 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 program (grant agreement No. 852386). The work of K. Z. is also supported by a Simons Investigator award.

Funding

T. H. and K. Z. are supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation “Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity” collaboration grant 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 program (grant agreement No. 852386). The work of K. Z. is also supported by a Simons Investigator award.

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Additional details

Created:
November 26, 2024
Modified:
November 26, 2024