Renormalization of massless Feynman amplitudes in configuration space (Q2925850)

Renormalization was developed to deal with ultraviolet divergences of Feynman amplitudes in quantum field theory starting as early as 1953 with an article by \textit{E. C. G. Stueckelberg} and \textit{A. Petermann} [Helv. Phys. Acta 26, 499--520 (1953; Zbl 0053.47506)], followed by a more serious mathematical approach of \textit{N. N. Bogoliubow} and \textit{O. S. Parasiuk} [Acta Math. 97, 227--266 (1957; Zbl 0081.43302)]. Since then many authors (Bros, Epstein, Glaser, Stora, Hepp, Zimmermann, Brunetti, Fredenhagen and others) contributed to renormalization theory and the concept of renormalization group in the context of perturbation theory. Infinities have thus been reduced to a well-defined mathematical problem, i.e. the extension of products of distributions in x-space when arguments tend to coincide. The aim of the present paper is to develop the view that solving the problem of renormalization for massless QFT requires a special technique of extending homogeneous Poincaré covariant amplitudes to provide a well-defined homogeneous distribution. A necessary and sufficient condition for the convergence is the vanishing of a so-called \textit{renormalization invariant residue}. The paper is organized as follows. Sec. 2 describes the description of the recursive reduction of the renormalization process to a sequence of extensions of distributions, either in the Euclidean or the Minkowskian space. Sec. 3 and 4 review the main features of associate homogeneous distributions and their extensions. Sec.5 provides the solution of the renormalization program as formulated in Sec. 2.