The renormalizability for massive Abelian gauge field theories re-visited

Abstract

We give a simplified proof for the perturbative renormalizability of theories with massive vector particles. For renormalizability it is sufficient that the vector particle is treated as an gauge field, corresponding to an Abelian gauge group. Contrary to the non-Abelian case one does not need the Higgs mechanism to create the appropriate mass terms. The proof uses ``Stueckelberg's trick'' and the Ward-Takahashi identities from local Abelian gauge invariance. The simplification is due to the fact that, again contrary to the non-Abelian case, no BRST analysis is needed.