The dressed-state formalisms, which incorporate interactions of soft particles into an asymptotic state, are known as the prescriptions expected to solve the problem of infrared (IR) divergence in the quantum field theory (QFT). A particularly famous example is the dressed-state formalism proposed by Kulish and Faddeev in quantum electrodynamics (QED). As pointed out by Hirai and Sugishita, however, this formalism has problems in gauge invariance and the IR divergence. These problems are mainly caused by the existence of ghosts or unphysical photon modes. Therefore, we start by studying the asymptotic states in the Coulomb gauge, which excludes ghosts and/or unphysical photon modes. In this paper, we propose a formalism to construct the asymptotic states directly from the interaction of the theory by setting a sufficiently large timescale $T$. In this dressed-state formalism, we define the asymptotic interaction remaining at $|t|>T$ in terms of some fixed order of $1/T$, and we are performing all calculations according to that order. We study the asymptotic states in QED specifically, but we can formally apply the dressed-state formalism proposed in this paper to any perturbative QFT. We show that, at least in QED, we can construct a divergence-free and unitary $S$-matrix using dressed states proposed in this paper. Furthermore, we discuss the transition rate to show that we can predict experimental results. We also show that the U(1) gauge symmetry of the $S$-matrix leads to the QED large gauge symmetry, and the deviation of the expectation values of the vector potential between initial and final spacelike hypersurfaces emerges as a QED memory effect. The dressed-state formalism in this paper may give a unified and new insight into IR physics, including asymptotic symmetries, memory effects, and unitarity of the state evolution.

• Received 8 July 2020
• Revised 15 September 2021
• Accepted 24 October 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.125004

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Published by the American Physical Society