Asymptotic Symmetries and Dressed States in QED and QCD

Abstract: Infrared divergences arising in theories with massless gauge bosons have been shown to cancel in scattering amplitudes when using dressed states constructed from the Faddeev- Kulish approach to the asymptotic states. It has been established that these states are closely related to asymptotic symmetries of the theory, that is, non-vanishing gauge trans- formations at the asymptotic boundary. In this thesis, we review both of these aspects for QED and non-Abelian gauge theories. We also investigate the expectation value of the non-Abelian field strength tensor using dressed states. We then present a novel con- struction of the dressing operator for non-Abelian gauge theories using Wilson lines. We demonstrate, to order O(g2), that each term of the dressing operator is reproduced in the presented Wilson line approach, along with additional terms that warrant a more thorough understanding. This work extends previous results that pertained to QED and gravity.