Journal of High Energy Physics (Feb 2018)

BMS supertranslation symmetry implies Faddeev-Kulish amplitudes

  • Sangmin Choi,
  • Ratindranath Akhoury

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2018)171
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2018, no. 2
pp. 1 – 22

Abstract

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Abstract We show explicitly that, among the scattering amplitudes constructed from eigenstates of the BMS supertranslation charge, the ones that conserve this charge, are equal to those constructed from Faddeev-Kulish states. Thus, Faddeev-Kulish states naturally arise as a consequence of the asymptotic symmetries of perturbative gravity and all charge conserving amplitudes are infrared finite. In the process we show an important feature of the Faddeev-Kulish clouds dressing the external hard particles: these clouds can be moved from the incoming states to the outgoing ones, and vice-versa, without changing the infrared finiteness properties of S matrix elements. We also apply our discussion to the problem of the decoherence of momentum configurations of hard particles due to soft boson effects.

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