Large gauge transformation; same bundle

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Let’s

say we have a topological space M and a topological group G and a principal G-bundle over M. A global section of this principal bundle is a gauge fixing and the process of replacing one section by another is a gauge transformation. If a gauge transformation isn’t homotopic to the identity, we call it a large gauge transformation.

In theoretical physics, M is often a manifold and G is a Lie group.

See also large diffeomorphism, global anomaly