In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian is invariant under a continuous group of local transformations.
The term gauge refers to redundant degrees of freedom in the Lagrangian. The transformations between possible gauges, called gauge transformations, form a Lie group which is referred to as the symmetry group or the gauge group of the theory. Associated with any Lie group is the Lie algebra of group generators. For each group generator there necessarily arises a corresponding vector field called the gauge field. Gauge fields are included in the Lagrangian to ensure its invariance under the local group transformations (called gauge invariance). When such a theory is quantized, the quanta of the gauge fields are called gauge bosons. If the symmetry group is non-commutative, the gauge theory is referred to as non-abelian, the usual example being the Yang–Mills theory.
Gauge theories are important as the successful field theories explaining the dynamics of elementary particles. Quantum electrodynamics is an abelian gauge theory with the symmetry group U(1) and has one gauge field, the electromagnetic field, with the photon being the gauge boson. The Standard Model is a non-abelian gauge theory with the symmetry group U(1)×SU(2)×SU(3) and has a total of twelve gauge bosons: the photon, three weak bosons and eight gluons.
Many powerful theories in physics are described by Lagrangians which are invariant under some symmetry transformation groups. When they are invariant under a transformation identically performed at every point in the space in which the physical processes occur, they are said to have a global symmetry. The requirement of local symmetry, the cornerstone of gauge theories, is a stricter constraint. In fact, a global symmetry is just a local symmetry whose group's parameters are fixed in space-time. Gauge symmetries can be viewed as analogues of the equivalence principle of general relativity in which each point in spacetime is allowed a choice of local reference (coordinate) frame. Both symmetries reflect a redundancy in the description of a system.
Historically, these ideas were first stated in the context of classical electromagnetism and later in general relativity. However, the modern importance of gauge symmetries appeared first in the relativistic quantum mechanics of electrons — quantum electrodynamics, elaborated on below. Today, gauge theories are useful in condensed matter, nuclear and high energy physics among other subfields.
History and importance
The earliest field theory having a gauge symmetry was Maxwell's formulation of electrodynamics in 1864. The importance of this symmetry remained unnoticed in the earliest formulations. Similarly unnoticed, Hilbert had derived the Einstein field equations by postulating the invariance of the action under a general coordinate transformation. Later Hermann Weyl, in an attempt to unify general relativity and electromagnetism, conjectured (incorrectly, as it turned out) that Eichinvarianz or invariance under the change of scale (or "gauge") might also be a local symmetry of general relativity. After the development of quantum mechanics, Weyl, Vladimir Fock and Fritz London modified gauge by replacing the scale factor with a complex quantity and turned the scale transformation into a change of phase — a U(1) gauge symmetry. This explained the electromagnetic field effect on the wave function of a charged quantum mechanical particle. This was the first widely recognised gauge theory, popularised by Pauli in the 1940s.[1]
In 1954, attempting to resolve some of the great confusion in elementary particle physics, Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills introduced non-abelian gauge theories as models to understand the strong interaction holding together nucleons in atomic nuclei. (Ronald Shaw, working under Abdus Salam, independently introduced the same notion in his doctoral thesis.) Generalizing the gauge invariance of electromagnetism, they attempted to construct a theory based on the action of the (non-abelian) SU(2) symmetry group on the isospin doublet of protons and neutrons. This is similar to the action of the U(1) group on the spinor fields of quantum electrodynamics. In particle physics the emphasis was on using quantized gauge theories.
This idea later found application in the quantum field theory of the weak force, and its unification with electromagnetism in the electroweak theory. Gauge theories became even more attractive when it was realized that non-abelian gauge theories reproduced a feature called asymptotic freedom. Asymptotic freedom was believed to be an important characteristic of strong interactions. This motivated searching for a strong force gauge theory. This theory, now known as quantum chromodynamics, is a gauge theory with the action of the SU(3) group on the color triplet of quarks. The Standard Model unifies the description of electromagnetism, weak interactions and strong interactions in the language of gauge theory.
In the 1970s, Sir Michael Atiyah began studying the mathematics of solutions to the classical Yang–Mills equations. In 1983, Atiyah's student Simon Donaldson built on this work to show that the differentiable classification of smooth 4-manifolds is very different from their classification up to homeomorphism. Michael Freedman used Donaldson's work to exhibit exotic R4s, that is, exotic differentiable structures on Euclidean 4-dimensional space. This led to an increasing interest in gauge theory for its own sake, independent of its successes in fundamental physics. In 1994, Edward Witten and Nathan Seiberg invented gauge-theoretic techniques based on supersymmetry which enabled the calculation of certain topological invariants. These contributions to mathematics from gauge theory have led to a renewed interest in this area.
The importance of gauge theories for physics stems from the tremendous success of the mathematical formalism in providing a unified framework to describe the quantum field theories of electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force. This theory, known as the Standard Model, accurately describes experimental predictions regarding three of the four fundamental forces of nature, and is a gauge theory with the gauge group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1). Modern theories like string theory, as well as some formulations of general relativity, are, in one way or another, gauge theories.
Description
Global and local symmetries
In physics, the mathematical description of any physical situation usually contains excess degrees of freedom; the same physical situation is equally well described by many equivalent mathematical configurations. For instance, in Newtonian dynamics, if two configurations are related by a Galilean transformation—an inertial change of reference frame—they represent the same physical situation. These transformations form a group of "symmetries" of the theory, and a physical situation corresponds not to an individual mathematical configuration but to a class of configurations related to one another by this symmetry group. This idea can be generalized to include local as well as global symmetries, analogous to much more abstract "changes of coordinates" in a situation where there is no preferred "inertial" coordinate system that covers the entire physical system. A gauge theory is a mathematical model that has symmetries of this kind, together with a set of techniques for making physical predictions consistent with the symmetries of the model.
Example of global symmetry
When a quantity occurring in the mathematical configuration is not just a number but has some geometrical significance, such as a velocity or an axis of rotation, its representation as numbers arranged in a vector or matrix is also changed by a coordinate transformation. For instance, if one description of a pattern of fluid flow states that the fluid velocity in the neighborhood of (x=1, y=0) is 1 m/s in the positive x direction, then a description of the same situation in which the coordinate system has been rotated clockwise by 90 degrees will state that the fluid velocity in the neighborhood of (x=0, y=1) is 1 m/s in the positive y direction. The coordinate transformation has affected both the coordinate system used to identify the location of the measurement and the basis in which its value is expressed. As long as this transformation is performed globally (affecting the coordinate basis in the same way at every point), the effect on values that represent the rate of change of some quantity along some path in space and time as it passes through point P is the same as the effect on values that are truly local to P.
Use of fiber bundles to describe local symmetries
In order to adequately describe physical situations in more complex theories, it is often necessary to introduce a "coordinate basis" for some of the objects of the theory that do not have this simple relationship to the coordinates used to label points in space and time. (In mathematical terms, the theory involves a fiber bundle in which the fiber at each point of the base space consists of possible coordinate bases for use when describing the values of objects at that point.) In order to spell out a mathematical configuration, one must choose a particular coordinate basis at each point (a local section of the fiber bundle) and express the values of the objects of the theory (usually "fields" in the physicist's sense) using this basis. Two such mathematical configurations are equivalent (describe the same physical situation) if they are related by a transformation of this abstract coordinate basis (a change of local section, or gauge transformation).
In most gauge theories, the set of possible transformations of the abstract gauge basis at an individual point in space and time is a finite-dimensional Lie group. The simplest such group is U(1), which appears in the modern formulation of quantum electrodynamics (QED) via its use of complex numbers. QED is generally regarded as the first, and simplest, physical gauge theory. The set of possible gauge transformations of the entire configuration of a given gauge theory also forms a group, the gauge group of the theory. An element of the gauge group can be parameterized by a smoothly varying function from the points of spacetime to the (finite-dimensional) Lie group, whose value at each point represents the action of the gauge transformation on the fiber over that point.
A gauge transformation with constant parameter at every point in space and time is analogous to a rigid rotation of the geometric coordinate system; it represents a global symmetry of the gauge representation. As in the case of a rigid rotation, this gauge transformation affects expressions that represent the rate of change along a path of some gauge-dependent quantity in the same way as those that represent a truly local quantity. A gauge transformation whose parameter is not a constant function is referred to as a local symmetry; its effect on expressions that involve a derivative is qualitatively different from that on expressions that don't. (This is analogous to a non-inertial change of reference frame, which can produce a Coriolis effect.)
Gauge fields
The "gauge covariant" version of a gauge theory accounts for this effect by introducing a gauge field (in mathematical language, an Ehresmann connection) and formulating all rates of change in terms of the covariant derivative with respect to this connection. The gauge field becomes an essential part of the description of a mathematical configuration. A configuration in which the gauge field can be eliminated by a gauge transformation has the property that its field strength (in mathematical language, its curvature) is zero everywhere; a gauge theory is not limited to these configurations. In other words, the distinguishing characteristic of a gauge theory is that the gauge field does not merely compensate for a poor choice of coordinate system; there is generally no gauge transformation that makes the gauge field vanish.
When analyzing the dynamics of a gauge theory, the gauge field must be treated as a dynamical variable, similarly to other objects in the description of a physical situation. In addition to its interaction with other objects via the covariant derivative, the gauge field typically contributes energy in the form of a "self-energy" term. One can obtain the equations for the gauge theory by:
* starting from a naïve ansatz without the gauge field (in which the derivatives appear in a "bare" form);
* listing those global symmetries of the theory that can be characterized by a continuous parameter (generally an abstract equivalent of a rotation angle);
* computing the correction terms that result from allowing the symmetry parameter to vary from place to place; and
* reinterpreting these correction terms as couplings to one or more gauge fields, and giving these fields appropriate self-energy terms and dynamical behavior.
This is the sense in which a gauge theory "extends" a global symmetry to a local symmetry, and closely resembles the historical development of the gauge theory of gravity known as general relativity.
Physical experiments
Gauge theories are used to model the results of physical experiments, essentially by:
* limiting the universe of possible configurations to those consistent with the information used to set up the experiment, and then
* computing the probability distribution of the possible outcomes that the experiment is designed to measure.
The mathematical descriptions of the "setup information" and the "possible measurement outcomes" (loosely speaking, the "boundary conditions" of the experiment) are generally not expressible without reference to a particular coordinate system, including a choice of gauge. (If nothing else, one assumes that the experiment has been adequately isolated from "external" influence, which is itself a gauge-dependent statement.) Mishandling gauge dependence in boundary conditions is a frequent source of anomalies in gauge theory calculations, and gauge theories can be broadly classified by their approaches to anomaly avoidance.
Continuum theories
The two gauge theories mentioned above (continuum electrodynamics and general relativity) are examples of continuum field theories. The techniques of calculation in a continuum theory implicitly assume that:
* given a completely fixed choice of gauge, the boundary conditions of an individual configuration can in principle be completely described;
* given a completely fixed gauge and a complete set of boundary conditions, the principle of least action determines a unique mathematical configuration (and therefore a unique physical situation) consistent with these bounds;
* the likelihood of possible measurement outcomes can be determined by:
o establishing a probability distribution over all physical situations determined by boundary conditions that are consistent with the setup information,
o establishing a probability distribution of measurement outcomes for each possible physical situation, and
o convolving these two probability distributions to get a distribution of possible measurement outcomes consistent with the setup information; and
* fixing the gauge introduces no anomalies in the calculation, due either to gauge dependence in describing partial information about boundary conditions or to incompleteness of the theory.
These assumptions are close enough to valid, across a wide range of energy scales and experimental conditions, to allow these theories to make accurate predictions about almost all of the phenomena encountered in daily life, from light, heat, and electricity to eclipses and spaceflight. They fail only at the smallest and largest scales (due to omissions in the theories themselves) and when the mathematical techniques themselves break down (most notably in the case of turbulence and other chaotic phenomena).
Quantum field theories
Other than these "classical" continuum field theories, the most widely known gauge theories are quantum field theories, including quantum electrodynamics and the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The starting point of a quantum field theory is much like that of its continuum analog: a gauge-covariant action integral which characterizes "allowable" physical situations according to the principle of least action. However, continuum and quantum theories differ significantly in how they handle the excess degrees of freedom represented by gauge transformations. Continuum theories, and most pedagogical treatments of the simplest quantum field theories, use a gauge fixing prescription to reduce the orbit of mathematical configurations that represent a given physical situation to a smaller orbit related by a smaller gauge group (the global symmetry group, or perhaps even the trivial group).
More sophisticated quantum field theories, in particular those which involve a non-abelian gauge group, break the gauge symmetry within the techniques of perturbation theory by introducing additional fields (the Faddeev–Popov ghosts) and counterterms motivated by anomaly cancellation, in an approach known as BRST quantization. While these concerns are in one sense highly technical, they are also closely related to the nature of measurement, the limits on knowledge of a physical situation, and the interactions between incompletely specified experimental conditions and incompletely understood physical theory. The mathematical techniques that have been developed in order to make gauge theories tractable have found many other applications, from solid-state physics and crystallography to low-dimensional topology.
