Soft Scalars don't decouple

Abstract

It is demonstrated that it is possible to find a field theory containing massless scalar particles which has infrared structure closely resembling that of quantum electrodynamics and perturbative quantum gravity but exhibiting no gauge invariance or internal symmetries at all, and in particular, no apparent asymptotic symmetry. It is shown that, unlike soft photons and gravitons, the soft scalars do not decouple from dressed states and they are generically produced when hard dressed particles interact. However, the entanglement of the hard and resulting soft particles is vanishingly small.