English

Gauge (in)dependence and background field formalism

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-05-01 v5

Abstract

It is shown that the gauge invariance and gauge dependence properties of effective action for Yang-Mills theories should be considered as two independent issues in the background field formalism. Application of this formalism to formulate the functional renormalization group approach is discussed. It is proven that there is a possibility to construct the corresponding average effective action invariant under the gauge transformations of background vector field. Nevertheless, being gauge invariant this action remains gauge dependent on-shell.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.02149,
  title  = {Gauge (in)dependence and background field formalism},
  author = {Peter M. Lavrov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.02149},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

14 pages, v2: typos corrected, v3:minor correction in Eqs. (2.24), v4: a reference added, misprints corrected, accepted for publication in PLB

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:46:11.059Z