Covariant Phase Space and Soft Factorization in Non-Abelian Gauge Theories

Abstract: We perform a careful study of the infrared sector of massless non-abelian gauge theories in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime using the covariant phase space formalism, taking into account the boundary contributions arising from the gauge sector of the theory. Upon quantization, we show that the boundary contributions lead to an infinite degeneracy of the vacua. The Hilbert space of the vacuum sector is not only shown to be remarkably simple, but also universal. We derive a Ward identity that relates the n-point amplitude between two generic in- and out-vacuum states to the one computed in standard QFT. In addition, we demonstrate that the familiar single soft gluon theorem and multiple consecutive soft gluon theorem are consequences of the Ward identity.