Nuclear PhysmsB246 (1984) 246-252
© North-Holland PubhsbangCompany
RENORMALIZATION OF GAUGE THEORIES: NON-LINEAR
GAUGES
J ZINN-JUSTIN
Serotce de PhyszqueThbortque, CEN-SA CLA Y, 91191 Gtf sur Yvette, Cedex, France
Recewed 28 May 1984
The renormahzed actton for gauge theories quantazed w~th non-hnear gauge condxtaons xs
written down m ~ts most general form A natural mterpretatton of the well-known quarttc ghost
term generated by renormalmattonts gwen m terms of a generahzed Faddeev-Popovdetemunant
1. Introduction
This short note presents mainly a (hopefully) pedagogical exercise which outhnes
some propertms of the renormahzation of gauge theories m non-linear gauges,
implicit in many early works, but may not be sufficiently publicized or written down
m standard text books [1]*.
In particular a natural interpretation of the quartic ghost term [2] wluch appears
in the renormalization of these gauges will be provided. A further motivation for
having these properties explicitly written down is that they are useful in the
discussion of the renormalization of some dynamical statistmal models [3].
The notation and conventions which I shall use throughout this artmle are those of
my Bonn lectures 1974 [4]. In particular I shall use the supercompact notations in
which unique indtces stand for space, Lorentz group index, and group radices.
Summatmn over repeated indices will always be meant.
2. Renormalization in non-linear gauge
I shall call A, the set of all fields of the theory (for simplicity I shall consider only
boson fields), the index t standing for all indices and space-time arguments. The
gauge invariant acUon will be E(A), and the gauge fixing term Fo(A). The ghosts
fields will be denoted by C. and Ca. An infinitesimal gauge transformation of
parameters ~0o will be written as
8A,= D~( A)o:,,. (1)
* For early references see the first 6 references m [1] The rest probably gdvesthe most soplusttcated
&scussxonof renormahzationproblems
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