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arXiv · 2101.12188

Emergent gauge symmetries: Yang-Mills theory

Abstract

Gauge symmetries remove unphysical states and guarantee that field theories are free from the pathologies associated with these states. In this work we find a set of general conditions that guarantee the removal of unphysical states in field theories describing interacting vector fields. These conditions are obtained through the extension of a mechanism for the emergence of gauge symmetries proposed in a previous article [C. Barcel\'o et al. JHEP 10 (2016) 084] in order to account for non-Abelian gauge symmetries, and are the following: low-energy Lorentz invariance, emergence of massless vector fields describable by an action quadratic in those fields and their derivatives, and self-coupling to a conserved current associated with specific rigid symmetries. Using a bootstrapping procedure, we prove that these conditions are equivalent to the emergence of gauge symmetries and, therefore, guarantee that any theory satisfying them must be equivalent to a Yang-Mills theory at low energies.

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Carlos Barceló, Raúl Carballo-Rubio, Luis J. Garay, Gerardo García-Moreno. 2021-01-28. Emergent gauge symmetries: Yang-Mills theory. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.104.025017

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