We study the non-uniqueness problem of the gauge-invariant angular momentum separation for the case of QED, which stems from the recent controversy concerning the proper definitions of the orbital angular momentum and spin operator of the individual parts of a gauge field system. For the free quantum electrodynamics without matter, we show that the basic requirement of Euclidean symmetry selects a unique physical angular momentum separation scheme from the multitude of the possible angular momentum separation schemes constructed using the various Gauge Invariant Extentions. Based on these results, we propose a set of natural angular momentum separation schemes for the case of interacting QED by invoking the formalism of asymptotic fields. Some perspectives on such a problem for the case of QCD are briefly discussed.
The covariant quantization of QED and QCD requires the introduction of subsidiary gauge-fixing and ghost fields and it is crucial to understand the role of these in the energy-momentum tensor, and in the momentum and angular momentum operators. These issues were studied in \cite{Leader:2011za}, and key results from this study were utilized in the major review of angular momentum in \cite{Leader:2013jra}. Damski \cite{Damski:2021feu} has rightly criticized as incorrect the derivation of certain equations in \cite{Leader:2011za}. We show, however, that the key results of \cite{Leader:2011za} whi…
We investigate the angular momentum decomposition with a quantum electrodynamics example to clarify the proton spin decomposition debates. We adopt the light-front formalism where the parton model is well defined. We prove that the sum of fermion and boson angular momenta is equal to half the sum of the two gravitational form factors $A(0)$ and $B(0)$, as is well known. However, the suggestion to make a separation of the above relation into the fermion and boson pieces, as a way to measure the orbital angular momentum of fermions or bosons, respectively, is not justified from our explicit calc…
We perform a systematic study on the spin decomposition of an electron in QED at one-loop order. It is found that the electron orbital angular momentum defined in Jaffe-Manohar and Ji spin sum rules agrees with each other, and the so-called potential angular momentum vanishes at this order. The calculations are performed in both dimensional regularization and Pauli-Villars regularization for the ultraviolet divergences, and they lead to consistent results. We further investigate the calculations in terms of light-front wave functions, and find a missing contribution from the instantaneous inte…
We investigate logarithmically enhanced electromagnetic corrections of all angular observables in inclusive B -> X_s l^+ l^-. We present analytical results, which are supplemented by a dedicated Monte Carlo study on the treatment of collinear photons in order to determine the size of the electromagnetic logarithms. We then give the Standard Model predictions of all observables, considering all available NNLO QCD, NLO QED and power corrections, and investigate their sensitivity to New Physics. Since the structure of the double differential decay rate is modified in the presence of QED correctio…
The shape of the electron is studied using lowest-order perturbation theory. Quantities used to probe the structure of the proton: form factors, generalized parton distributions, transverse densities, Wigner distributions and the angular momentum content are computed for the electron-photon component of the electron wave function. The influence of longitudinally polarized photons, demanded by the need for infrared regularization via a non-zero photon mass, is included. The appropriate value of the photon mass depends on experimental conditions, and consequently the size of the electron (as def…
I discuss the momentum and angular momentum decomposition problem in the Abelian Higgs model. The usual gauge-invariant extension (GIE) construction is incorporated naturally into the framework of quantum gauge transformation $\grave{a}$ ${\it la}$ Strocchi and Wightman and with this I investigate the momentum and angular momentum separation in a class of GIE conditions which correspond to the so-called "static gauges". Using this language I find that the so-called "generator criterion" does not generally hold even for the dressed physical field. In the case of $U(1)$ symmetry breaking, I gene…
One of the challenges of hadronic physics is to fully understand the structure of the proton. In particular, there is nowadays a great interest in the decomposition of its total angular momentum into orbital angular momentum and intrinsic spin, as well as identifying contributions from valence quarks, sea quarks and gluons. The most common decompositions of angular momentum are the Jaffe-Manohar (canonical) and Ji (kinetic) decompositions, which differ in the way contributions are attributed to quarks and gluons. Using perturbation theory, explicit one-loop calculations found that the differen…
