Conservation Laws from Asymptotic Symmetry and Subleading Charges in QED

Abstract

We present several results on memory effects, asymptotic symmetry and soft theorems in massive QED. We first clarify in what sense the memory effects are interpreted as the charge conservation of the large gauge transformations, and derive the leading and subleading memory effects in classical electromagnetism. We also show that the sub-subleading charges are not conserved without including contributions from the spacelike infinity. Next, we study QED in the BRST formalism and show that parts of large gauge transformations are physical symmetries by justifying that they are not gauge redundancies. Finally, we obtain the expression of charges associated with the subleading soft photon theorem in massive scalar QED.