Infrared divergences and the photon mass in QED

The infrared properties of QED are investigated within the framework of the Dyson-Schwinger equations. Our study finds that, independently of the value of the coupling constant, requiring the photon self-energy to be finite for any momenta, combined with a smooth behavior for the photon-fermion vertex, is equivalent to stating that the photon is massless and that the photon propagator diverges at low momenta as <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <a:mn>1</a:mn> <a:mo>/</a:mo> <a:msup> <a:mi>k</a:mi> <a:mn>2</a:mn> </a:msup> </a:math> . Furthermore, the Schwinger mechanism to generate, in a gauge invariant way, a photon mass is investigated and the form factors that can be at the origin of a possible photon mass are identified. For the Schwinger mechanism the link between the finiteness of the photon self-energy and the masslessness of the photon is lost. The infrared behavior of the fermion gap equation and the vertex equation are found to be infrared safe integral equations.