Some Features of the Direct and Inverse Double-Compton Effect as Applied to Astrophysics

In the present paper, the process of inverse double-Compton (IDC) scattering is considered in the context of astrophysical applications. It is assumed that the two hard X-ray photons emitted from an astrophysical source are scattered on a free electron and converted into a single soft photon of optical range. Using the QED S-matrix formalism for the derivation of a cross-section of direct double-Compton (DDC) scattering and assuming detailed balance conditions, an analytical expression for the cross-section of the IDC process is presented. It is shown that at fixed energies of incident photons, the inverse cross-section has no infrared divergences, and its behavior is completely defined by the spectral characteristics of the photon source itself, in particular by the finite interaction time of radiation with an electron. Thus, even for the direct process, the problem of resolving infrared divergence actually refers to a real physical source of radiation in which photons are never actually plane waves. As a result, the physical frequency profile of the scattered radiation for DDC as well as for IDC processes is a function of both the intensity and line shape of the incident photon field.

CP-violating transport theory for electroweak baryogenesis with thermal corrections

We derive CP-violating transport equations for fermions for electroweak baryogenesis from the CTP-formalism including thermal corrections at the one-loop level. We consider both the VEV-insertion approximation (VIA) and the semiclassical (SC) formalism. We show that the VIA-method is based on an assumption that leads to an ill-defined source term containing a pinch singularity, whose regularisation by thermal effects leads to ambiguities including spurious ultraviolet and infrared divergences. We then carefully review the derivation of the semiclassical formalism and extend it to include thermal corrections. We present the semiclassical Boltzmann equations for thermal WKB-quasiparticles with source terms up to the second order in gradients that contain both dispersive and finite width corrections. We also show that the SC-method reproduces the current divergence equations and that a correct implementation of the Fick's law captures the semiclassical source term even with conserved total current ∂μ j μ = 0. Our results show that the VIA-source term is not just ambiguous, but that it does not exist. Finally, we show that the collisional source terms reported earlier in the semiclassical literature are also spurious, and vanish in a consistent calculation.

Infrared-safe scattering without photon vacuum transitions and time-dependent decoherence

Scattering in 3 + 1-dimensional QED is believed to give rise to transitions between different photon vacua. We show that these transitions can be removed by taking into account off-shell modes which correspond to Liénard-Wiechert fields of asymptotic states. This makes it possible to formulate scattering in 3 + 1-dimensional QED on a Hilbert space which furnishes a single representation of the canonical commutation relations (CCR). Different QED selection sectors correspond to inequivalent representations of the photon CCR and are stable under the action of an IR finite, unitary S-matrix. Infrared divergences are cancelled by IR radiation. Using this formalism, we discuss the time-dependence of decoherence and phases of out-going density matrix elements in the presence of classical currents. The results demonstrate that although no information about a scattering process is stored in strictly zero-energy modes of the photon field, entanglement between charged matter and low energy modes increases over time.

AdS bulk locality from sharp CFT bounds

It is a long-standing conjecture that any CFT with a large central charge and a large gap ∆gap in the spectrum of higher-spin single-trace operators must be dual to a local effective field theory in AdS. We prove a sharp form of this conjecture by deriving numerical bounds on bulk Wilson coefficients in terms of ∆gap using the conformal bootstrap. Our bounds exhibit the scaling in ∆gap expected from dimensional analysis in the bulk. Our main tools are dispersive sum rules that provide a dictionary between CFT dispersion relations and S-matrix dispersion relations in appropriate limits. This dictionary allows us to apply recently-developed flat-space methods to construct positive CFT functionals. We show how AdS4 naturally resolves the infrared divergences present in 4D flat-space bounds. Our results imply the validity of twice-subtracted dispersion relations for any S-matrix arising from the flat-space limit of AdS/CFT.

Normalization of D-instanton amplitudes

D-instanton amplitudes suffer from various infrared divergences associated with tachyonic or massless open string modes, leading to ambiguous contribution to string amplitudes. It has been shown previously that string field theory can resolve these ambiguities and lead to unambiguous expressions for D-instanton contributions to string amplitudes, except for an overall normalization constant that remains undetermined. In this paper we show that string field theory, together with the world-sheet description of the amplitudes, can also fix this normalization constant. We apply our analysis to the special case of two dimensional string theory, obtaining results in agreement with the matrix model results obtained by Balthazar, Rodriguez and Yin.

Infrared Effects

It is shown that the presence of zero mass particles makes the elements of the S-matrix divergent. We explain the physical origin of such divergences. We argue that they are due to the long range of the interactions which violate the assumptions we made when we derived the asymptotic conditions for scattering. We study these divergences in the particular case of QED at tree, as well as one-loop level and present the Bloch–Nordsieck solution. We show that the cancellation of infrared divergences among virtual exchanged and real emitted soft photons is true to all orders in the perturbation expansion and we obtain the Sudakov double logarithm formula for Coulomb scattering.

The Electromagnetic Interactions

We briefly review the birth of renormalisation theory at the 1947 Shelter Island conference. We study the particular case of quantum electrodynamics in the example of an electron scattered by an external electromagnetic field. We give the general form of the amplitude in terms of form factors. At one loop the amplitude has both ultraviolet and infrared divergences. We show how to absorb the ultraviolet divergences by means of counterterms whose values are determined by the renormalisation conditions. We also show that at one loop order the electron anomalous magnetic moment is free of divergences, ultraviolet as well as infrared, and present its explicit calculation.

Two-loop $$ \mathcal{O} $$((αt + αλ + ακ)2) corrections to the Higgs boson masses in the CP-violating NMSSM

We present our computation of the $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O ((αt + αλ + ακ)2) two-loop corrections to the Higgs boson masses of the CP-violating Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) using the Feynman-diagrammatic approach in the gaugeless limit at vanishing external momentum. We choose a mixed $$ \overline{\mathrm{DR}} $$ DR ¯ -on-shell (OS) renormalisation scheme for the Higgs sector and apply both $$ \overline{\mathrm{DR}} $$ DR ¯ and OS renormalisation in the top/stop sector. For the treatment of the infrared divergences we apply and compare three different regularisation methods: the introduction of a regulator mass, the application of a small momentum expansion, and the inclusion of the full momentum dependence. Our new corrections have been implemented in the Fortran code NMSSMCALC that computes the Higgs mass spectrum of the CP-conserving and CP-violating NMSSM as well as the Higgs boson decays including the state-of-the-art higher-order corrections. Our numerical analysis shows that the newly computed corrections increase with rising λ and κ, remaining overall below about 3% compared to our previously computed $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (αt(αt + αs)) corrections, in the region compatible with perturbativity below the GUT scale. The renormalisation scheme and scale dependence is of typical two-loop order. The impact of the CP-violating phases in the new corrections is small. We furthermore show that the Goldstone Boson Catastrophe due to the infrared divergences can be treated in a numerically efficient way by introducing a regulator mass that approximates the momentum-dependent results best for squared mass values in the permille range of the squared renormalisation scale. Our results mark another step forward in the program of increasing the precision in the NMSSM Higgs boson observables.

Celestial IR divergences and the effective action of supertranslation modes

Infrared divergences in perturbative gravitational scattering amplitudes have been recently argued to be governed by the two-point function of the supertranslation Goldstone mode on the celestial sphere. We show that the form of this celestial two-point function simply derives from an effective action that also controls infrared divergences in the symplectic structure of General Relativity with asymptotically flat boundary conditions. This effective action finds its natural place in a path integral formulation of a celestial conformal field theory, as we illustrate by re-deriving the infrared soft factors in terms of celestial correlators. Our analysis relies on a well-posed action principle close to spatial infinity introduced by Compère and Dehouck.