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Mass Generation, Ghost Condensation and Broken Symmetry: SU(2) in Covariant Abelian Gauges

Martin Schaden
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Abstract

The local action of an SU(2) gauge theory in general covariant Abelian gauges and the associated equivariant BRST symmetry that guarantees the perturbative renormalizability of the model are given. A global SL(2,R) symmetry of the model is spontaneously broken by ghost-antighost condensation at arbitrarily small coupling. This leads to propagators that are finite at Euclidean momenta for all elementary fields except the Abelian ``photon''. Ward Identities show that the symmetry breaking gives rise to massless BRST-quartets with ghost numbers (1,2,-2,-1) and (0,1,-1,0). The latter quartet is interpreted as due to an Abelian Higgs mechanism in the dual description of the model.

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Martin Schaden. 2001-08-07. Mass Generation, Ghost Condensation and Broken Symmetry: SU(2) in Covariant Abelian Gauges. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812778567_0026

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