Ultraviolet Cutoffs And The Photon Mass

The momentum UV cutoff in Quantum Field Theory is usually treated as an auxiliary device allowing to obtain finite amplitudes satisfying all physical requirements. It is even absent ( not explicit) in the most popular approach - the dimensional regularization. We point out that if the momentum cutoff is to be treated as a bona fide physical scale, presumably equal or related to the Planck scale, the field theory must have a very special features in order not to lead to unacceptable predictions. One of such predictions would be a non-zero mass of the photon. In the naive approach, even with the cutoff equal to the Planck scale, this mass would grossly exceed the existing experimental bounds. We present this danger doing an explicit calculation using a concrete realization of the physical cutoff and speculate about the way to restore gauge symmetry order-by-order in the inverse powers of the cutoff scale.