QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS AT LARGE DISTANCES .2. NATURE OF THE DOMINANT SINGULARITIES

Accurate calculations of macroscopic and mesoscopic properties in quantum electrodynamics require careful treatment of infrared divergences: Standard treatments introduce spurious large-distances effects. A method for computing these properties was developed in paper I. That method depends upon a result obtained here about the nature of the singularities that produce the dominant large-distance behavior. If all particles in quantum field theory have a nonzero mass then the Landau-Nakanishi diagrams give strong conditions on the singularities of the scattering functions. I These conditions are severely weakened in quantum electrodynamics by the effects of points where photon momenta vanish. A new kind of Landau-Nakanishi diagram is developed here. It is geared specifically to the pole-decomposition functions that dominate the macroscopic behavior in quantum electrodynamics, and leads to strong results for these functions at points where photon momenta vanish.