On the Geometrical Structure of Covariant Anomalies in Yang-Mills Theory

Covariant anomalies are studied in terms of the theory of secondary characteristic classes of the universal bundle of Yang-Mills theory. A new set of descent equations is derived which contains the covariant current anomaly and the covariant Schwinger term. The counterterms relating consistent and covariant anomalies are determined. A geometrical realization of the BRS/anti-BRS algebra is presented which is used to understand the relationship between covariant anomalies in different approaches.Comment: 19 pages, LMU-TPW 92-31 (January 93

Field Space Entanglement Entropy, Zero Modes and Lifshitz Models

The field space entanglement entropy of a quantum field theory is obtained by integrating out a subset of its fields. We study an interacting quantum field theory consisting of massless scalar fields on a closed compact manifold M. To this model we associate its Lifshitz dual model. The ground states of both models are invariant under constant shifts. We interpret this invariance as gauge symmetry and subject the models to proper gauge fixing. By applying the heat kernel regularization one can show that the field space entanglement entropies of the massless scalar field model and of its Lifshitz dual are agreeing.Comment: 13 pages, revised and extended version, accepted for publication in Physics Letters

Aspects of Higher-Abelian Gauge Theories at zero and finite temperature: Topological Casimir effect, duality and Polyakov loops

Higher-abelian gauge theories associated with Cheeger-Simons differential characters are studied on compact manifolds without boundary. The paper consists of two parts: First the functional integral formulation based on zeta function regularization is revisited and extended in order to provide a general framework for further applications. A field theoretical model - called extended higher-abelian Maxwell theory - is introduced, which is a higher-abelian version of Maxwell theory of electromagnetism extended by a particular topological action. This action is parametrized by two non-dynamical harmonic forms and generalizes the $\theta$-term in usual gauge theories. In the second part the general framework is applied to study the topological Casimir effect in higher-abelian gauge theories at finite temperature at equilibrium. The extended higher-abelian Maxwell theory is discussed in detail and an exact expression for the free energy is derived. A non-trivial topology of the background space-time modifies the spectrum of both the zero-point fluctuations and the occupied states forming the thermal ensemble. The vacuum (Casimir) energy has two contributions: one related to the propagating modes and the second one related to the topologically inequivalent configurations of higher-abelian gauge fields. In the high temperature limit the leading term is of Stefan-Boltzmann type and the topological contributions are suppressed. With a particular choice of parameters extended higher-abelian Maxwell theories of different degrees are shown to be dual. On the $n$-dimensional torus we provide explicit expressions for the thermodynamic functions in the low- and high temperature regimes, respectively. Finally, the impact of the background topology on the two-point correlation function of a higher-abelian variant of the Polyakov loop operator is analyzed.Comment: v2: typos corrected; Version accepted for publication in Nucl. Phys. B; 56 page

Global Path Integral Quantization of Yang-Mills Theory

Based on a generalization of the stochastic quantization scheme recently a modified Faddeev-Popov path integral density for the quantization of Yang-Mills theory was derived, the modification consisting in the presence of specific finite contributions of the pure gauge degrees of freedom. Due to the Gribov problem the gauge fixing can be defined only locally and the whole space of gauge potentials has to be partitioned into patches. We propose a global path integral density for the Yang-Mills theory by summing over all patches, which can be proven to be manifestly independent of the specific local choices of patches and gauge fixing conditions, respectively. In addition to the formulation on the whole space of gauge potentials we discuss the corresponding global path integral on the gauge orbit space relating it to the original Parisi-Wu stochastic quantization scheme and to a proposal of Stora, respectively.Comment: 8 pages, Latex, extended versio

QED Revisited: Proving Equivalence Between Path Integral and Stochastic Quantization

We perform the stochastic quantization of scalar QED based on a generalization of the stochastic gauge fixing scheme and its geometric interpretation. It is shown that the stochastic quantization scheme exactly agrees with the usual path integral formulation.Comment: 11 page