Stability, creation and annihilation of charges in gauge theories

We show how to construct physical, minimal energy states for systems of static and moving charges. These states are manifestly gauge invariant. For charge-anticharge systems we also construct states in which the gauge fields are restricted to a finite volume around the location of the matter fields. Although this is an excited state, it is not singular, unlike all previous finite volume descriptions. We use our states to model the processes of pair creation and annihilation.