It has been known since the earliest days of quantum field theory (QFT) that infrared divergences arise in scattering theory with massless fields. These infrared divergences are manifestations of the memory effect: At order $1/r$ a massless field generically will not return to the same value at late retarded times ($u\to +\infty$) as it had at early retarded times ($u\to -\infty$). There is nothing singular about states with memory, but they do not lie in the standard Fock space. Infrared divergences are merely artifacts of trying to represent states with memory in the standard Fock space. If one is interested only in quantities directly relevant to collider physics, infrared divergences can be successfully dealt with by imposing an infrared cutoff, calculating inclusive quantities, and then removing the cutoff. However, this approach does not allow one to treat memory as a quantum observable and is highly unsatisfactory if one wishes to view the $S$-matrix as a fundamental quantity in QFT and quantum gravity, since the $S$-matrix itself is undefined. In order to have a well-defined $S$-matrix, it is necessary to define “in” and “out” Hilbert spaces that incorporate memory in a satisfactory way. Such a construction was given by Faddeev and Kulish for quantum electrodynamics (QED) with a massive charged field. Their construction can be understood as pairing momentum eigenstates of the charged particles with corresponding memory representations of the electromagnetic field to produce states of vanishing large gauge charges at spatial infinity. (This procedure is usually referred to as “dressing” the charged particles.) We investigate this procedure for QED with massless charged particles and show that, as a consequence of collinear divergences, the required dressing in this case has an infinite total energy flux, so that the states obtained in the Faddeev-Kulish construction are unphysical. An additional difficulty arises in Yang-Mills theory, due to the fact that the “soft Yang-Mills particles” used for the dressing contribute to the Yang-Mills charge-current flux, thereby invalidating the procedure used to construct eigenstates of large gauge charges at spatial infinity. We show that there are insufficiently many charge eigenstates to accommodate scattering theory. In quantum gravity, the analog of the Faddeev-Kulish construction would attempt to produce a Hilbert space of eigenstates of supertranslation charges at spatial infinity. Again, the Faddeev-Kulish dressing procedure does not produce the desired eigenstates because the dressing contributes to the null memory flux. We prove that there are no eigenstates of supertranslation charges at spatial infinity apart from the vacuum. Thus, analogs of the Faddeev-Kulish construction fail catastrophically in quantum gravity. We investigate some alternatives to Faddeev-Kulish constructions but find that these also do not work. We believe that if one wishes to treat scattering at a fundamental level in quantum gravity—as well as in massless QED and Yang-Mills theory—it is necessary to approach it from an algebraic viewpoint on the “in” and “out” states, wherein one does not attempt to “shoehorn” these states into some prechosen “in” and “out” Hilbert spaces. We outline the framework of such a scattering theory, which would be manifestly infrared finite.

• Received 25 April 2022
• Accepted 16 June 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.066005

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Published by the American Physical Society