Entangled Scent of a Charge

Abstract

We argue that the ground state of a field theory, in the presence of charged particles, becomes an entangled state involving an infinity of soft photons. The quantum field vacuum is altered by the passage of a uniformly moving charge, leaving in its wake a different dressed ground state. In this sense a charged particle leaves its electromagnetic scent even after passing by. Unlike in classical electrodynamics the effect of the charge remains even at infinite time. The calculation is done in detail for the ground state of a spacetime wedge, although the results are more general. This agrees in spirit with recent results over the infrared aspects of field theory, although the technical details are different. These considerations open the possibility that the information carried by quantum fields, being nonlocal, does not disappear beyond the horizon of black holes.

10 pages. Minor corrections and added references

References in corpus (8)

• Searching for gravitational wave memory bursts with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• Sub-subleading Soft Graviton Theorem in Generic Theories of Quantum Gravity
• Dressed infrared quantum information
• Spontaneous Lorentz Violation: The Case of Infrared QED
• Asymptotic dynamics, large gauge transformations and infrared symmetries
• An Action for the Infrared Regime of Gauge Theories and the Problem of Color Transformations
• Loss of coherence and dressing in QED
• Localization in the Rindler Wedge

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Killing Horizons Decohere Quantum Superpositions
• IR dynamics and entanglement entropy
• Spectral Noncommutative Geometry, Standard Model and all that
• Soft photon radiation and entanglement
• Remark on the synergy between the heat kernel techniques and the parity anomaly