No Arabic abstract
We construct the Faddeev-Kulish asymptotic states in a quantum field theory of electric and magnetic charges. We find that there are two kind of dressings: apart from the well known (electric) Wilson line dressing, there is a magnetic counterpart which can be written as a t Hooft line operator. The t Hooft line dressings are charged under the magnetic large gauge transformation (LGT), but are neutral under electric LGT. This is in contrast to the Faddeev-Kulish dressings of electrons, which can be written as a Wilson line operator and are charged under electric LGT but neutral under magnetic LGT. With these dressings and the corresponding construction of the coherent states, the infrared finiteness of the theory of electric and magnetic charges is guaranteed. Even in the absence of magnetic monopoles, the electric and magnetic soft modes exhibit the electromagnetic duality of vacuum Maxwell theory. Using only the asymptotic form of three-point interactions in a field theory of electric and magnetic charges, we show that the leading magnetic dressings, like the leading electric ones, are exact in the field theory of electric and magnetic charges, in accordance with a conjecture of Strominger. We then extend the construction to perturbative quantum gravity in asymptotically flat spacetime, and construct gravitational t Hooft line dressings that are charged under dual supertranslations. The duality in the quantum theory between the electric and magnetic soft charges and their dressings is thus made manifest.
We consider the consequences of the dual gravitational charges for the phase space of radiating modes, and find that they imply a new soft NUT theorem. In particular, we argue that the existence of these new charges removes the need for imposing boundary conditions at spacelike infinity that would otherwise preclude the existence of NUT charges.
Recently it was conjectured that a certain infinite-dimensional diagonal subgroup of BMS supertranslations acting on past and future null infinity (${mathscr I}^-$ and ${mathscr I}^+$) is an exact symmetry of the quantum gravity ${cal S}$-matrix, and an associated Ward identity was derived. In this paper we show that this supertranslation Ward identity is precisely equivalent to Weinbergs soft graviton theorem. Along the way we construct the canonical generators of supertranslations at ${mathscr I}^pm$, including the relevant soft graviton contributions. Boundary conditions at the past and future of ${mathscr I}^pm$ and a correspondingly modified Dirac bracket are required. The soft gravitons enter as boundary modes and are manifestly the Goldstone bosons of spontaneously broken supertranslation invariance.
We show that there are a further infinite number of, previously unknown, supertranslation charges. These can be viewed as duals of the known BMS charges corresponding to supertranslations. In Newman-Penrose language, these new supertranslation charges roughly correspond to the imaginary part of the leading term in $psi_2$. We find these charges by dualising the Barnich-Brandt asymptotic charges and argue that this prescription gives rise to new bona fide charges at null infinity.
We construct Faddeev-Kulish states in QED and perturbative quantum gravity to subleading order in the soft momentum expansion and to first order in the coupling constant, using the charge conservation formula of asymptotic symmetries associated with the tree-level subleading soft theorems. We demonstrate that the emission and absorption of soft photons/gravitons in dressed amplitudes vanish. The fact that no additional soft radiation may be added to a dressed amplitude supports the claim that, in the dressed state formalism, the soft and hard sectors of scattering processes are correlated. We also show that the dressed virtual amplitudes are equivalent to the infrared-finite part of the traditional amplitudes constructed using Fock states. Since there is no real soft radiation in the asymptotic Hilbert space, the dressed state formalism gives the same cross sections as the Bloch-Nordsieck method.
Dual gravitational charges have been recently computed from the Holst term in tetrad variables using covariant phase space methods. We highlight that they originate from an exact 3-form in the tetrad symplectic potential that has no analogue in metric variables. Hence there exists a choice of the tetrad symplectic potential that sets the dual charges to zero. This observation relies on the ambiguity of the covariant phase space methods. To shed more light on the dual contributions, we use the Kosmann variation to compute (quasi-local) Hamiltonian charges for arbitrary diffeomorphisms. We obtain a formula that illustrates comprehensively why the dual contribution to the Hamiltonian charges: (i) vanishes for exact isometries and asymptotic symmetries at spatial infinity; (ii) persists for asymptotic symmetries at future null infinity, in addition to the usual BMS contribution. Finally, we point out that dual gravitational charges can be equally derived using the Barnich-Brandt prescription based on cohomological methods, and that the same considerations on asymptotic symmetries apply.