English

The Yang-Mills field strength revisited

Mathematical Physics 2009-08-14 v3 math.MP History and Philosophy of Physics

Abstract

The Yang-Mills field strength incorporating a non-Abelian feature is one of the cornerstones of the standard model. Although Yang-Mills gauge theories have been around for over fifty years, surprisingly the derivation of the Yang-Mills field strength using classical gauge theory does not appear anywhere in the literature. In their 1954 paper, Yang and Mills had to invent a non-Abelian field strength to satisfy certain criteria. In Section 5 we use Yang's gauge transformation in a heuristic derivation of the Yang-Mills field strength. The preceding sections cover material relating to the derivation. Section 3 shows where Pauli in the article cited by Yang and Mills gives an expression for the electro-magnetic field strength in terms of a commutator. For some reason, Yang and Mills did not use this approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0712.2623,
  title  = {The Yang-Mills field strength revisited},
  author = {Samuel L. Marateck},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0712.2623},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

5 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T09:54:39.133Z