THIRRINGS LOW-ENERGY THEOREM AND ITS GENERALIZATIONS IN THE ELECTROWEAK STANDARD MODEL

The radiative corrections to Compton scattering vanish in the low-ener gy limit in all orders of perturbation theory. This theorem, which is well-known for Abelian gauge theories, is proved in the electroweak St andard Model. Moreover, analogous theorems are derived for photon scat tering off other charged particles, in particular W bosons. Since the theorems follow from gauge invariance and on-shell renormalization, th eir derivation is most conveniently performed in the framework of the background-field method. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.