Physics Letters B 779 (2018) 275–282
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Gauge copies in the Landau–DeWitt gauge: A background invariant
restriction
David Dudal
a,b,∗
, David Vercauteren
c
a
KU Leuven Campus Kortrijk – Kulak, Department of Physics, Etienne Sabbelaan 53 bus 7657, 8500 Kortrijk, Belgium
b
Ghent University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Krijgslaan 281-S9, 9000 Gent, Belgium
c
Duy Tân University, Institute of Research and Development, P809, 3 Quang Trung, Hải Châu, Ðà Nẵng, Viet Nam
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
1 December 2017
Received
in revised form 5 February 2018
Accepted
9 February 2018
Available
online 13 February 2018
Editor:
M. Cveti
ˇ
c
The Landau background gauge, also known as the Landau–DeWitt gauge, has found renewed interest
during the past decade given its usefulness in accessing the confinement-deconfinement transition via
the vacuum expectation value of the Polyakov loop, describable via an appropriate background. In this
Letter, we revisit this gauge from the viewpoint of it displaying gauge (Gribov) copies. We generalize
the Gribov–Zwanziger effective action in a BRST and background invariant way; this action leads to a
restriction on the allowed gauge fluctuations, thereby eliminating the infinitesimal background gauge
copies. The explicit background invariance of our action is in contrast with earlier attempts to write
down and use an effective Gribov–Zwanziger action. It allows to address certain subtleties arising in
these earlier works, such as a spontaneous and thus spurious Lorentz symmetry breaking, something
which is now averted.
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
A powerful quantization procedure for locally gauge invariant
Yang–Mills theories is the background field formalism, in which
formalism the gauge field is split in a non-propagating “classical”
background and a fluctuating quantum part which is integrated
over in the path integral procedure. Just as when dealing with an
ordinary gauge theory, the quantum gauge fields need to be gauge
fixed in the continuum. A particularly useful class of gauges in this
context are the background covariant gauges; in these gauges, the
background field formalism possesses the important property that,
after gauge fixing of and integration over the quantum fields, the
eventual (effective) action ought to still be invariant with respect
to gauge transformations of the background fields. Useful refer-
ences
are [1,2].
Background
gauges found a renewed interest during the past
decade thanks to their usefulness in probing a typical (non-local)
order parameter for the deconfinement transition, the Polyakov
loop, whose behaviour can be encoded in a simple specific back-
ground,
see [3–9]. Also in the pinch technique combined with
Dyson–Schwinger equations, the background field formalism plays
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: david .dudal @kuleuven .be (D. Dudal),
vercauterendavid @dtu .edu .vn (D. Vercauteren).
a central role [10–12]. Algebraic aspects of a specific background
gauge, the Landau–DeWitt one, including an all order renormaliz-
ability
proof, were considered in [13–15].
Albeit
powerful, the (covariant) background gauges are also not
free from the famous Gribov ambiguity [16] hampering the quanti-
zation:
multiple gauge equivalent copies of a given quantum gauge
field obey the same gauge condition. To deal with this ambiguity,
one possibility is to further constrain the space of gauge configu-
rations
to be integrated over in the path integral, a procedure pro-
posed
by Gribov in [16]and worked out by Zwanziger in e.g. [17,
18]for
the standard Landau gauge. The end point is an effective
action — the Gribov–Zwanziger action — implementing this restric-
tion.
More references can be found in [19].
In
the presence of backgrounds, seminal work is [20], based
on which a background version of the Gribov–Zwanziger effec-
tive
action was proposed and used to probe non-perturbative finite
temperature dynamics in [21,22].
In
this Letter, we revisit in Section 2 the problem of Gribov
copies in the Landau–DeWitt gauge and try to derive a Gribov–
Zwanziger
action. Although succeeding in the latter, we identify
a major drawback, shared with the conjectured action in [21,22]:
even at zero temperature, a non-zero value of a Lorentz symme-
try
breaking background is energetically favoured. The problem is
traced back to the lack of background gauge invariance and, un-
derlyingly,
of BRST invariance of the original Gribov–Zwanziger
approach. Motivated by the observation in [13] that in the back-
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2018.02.014
0370-2693/
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.