A. Neumaier
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The part of Strominger's work you refer to is actually not so new.Demystifier said:In a last couple of days I was reading about a whole new line of research about IR physics, reviewed in https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05448. In particular, it is argued that large gauge transformations can map physical states into new physically inequivalent states.
It is known at least since the 1960s that relativistic quantum field theories with zero mass particles in the defining Fock space (which includes QED and QCD) have a nontrivial superselection structure, in which the superselection sectors define physically inequivalent Hilbert spaces, and that large gauge transformations provide (because of the inequivalence somewhat ill-defined) maps between these sectors. Ignoring this superselection structure is the root of the infrared problems.
For a reasonably rigorous discussion see the 1968 papers by Kibble.
This doesn't help your thesis that single quarks at rest might exist, since the physical Hilbert space of QCD only consists of uncolored (gauge invariant) states.Demystifier said:In the context of this thread, it is argued that, in the absence of confinement, quarks in a color singlet state may physically turn into a color non-singlet state. https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08016
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