Gauge Is More Than Mathematical Redundancy
High Energy Physics - Theory
2021-04-14 v1 History and Philosophy of Physics
Abstract
Physical systems may couple to other systems through variables that are not gauge invariant. When we split a gauge system into two subsystems, the gauge-invariant variables of the two subsystems have less information than the gauge invariant variables of the original system; the missing information regards degrees of freedom that express relations between the subsystems. All this shows that gauge invariance is a formalization of the relational nature of physical degrees of freedom. The recent developments on boundary variables and boundary charges are clarified by this observation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2009.10362,
title = {Gauge Is More Than Mathematical Redundancy},
author = {Carlo Rovelli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.10362},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
3 pages. To appear in the proceedings of the conference "One Hundred Years of Gauge Theory, Bad Honnef 2018", S. De Bianchi and C. Kiefer eds