Introduction To Gauge Theory

Introduction To Gauge Theory

In physics, gauge invariance (also called gauge symmetry) is the property of a field theory in which different configurations of the underlying fields — which are not themselves directly observable — result in identical observable quantities. A theory with such a property is called a gauge theory. A transformation from one such field configuration to another is called a gauge transformation.

Modern physical theories describe reality in terms of fields, e.g., the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field, and fields for the electron and all other elementary particles. A general feature of these theories is that none of these fundamental fields, which are the fields that change under a gauge transformation, can be directly measured. On the other hand, the observable quantities, namely the ones that can be measured experimentally — charges, energies, velocities, etc. — do not change under a gauge transformation, even though they are derived from the fields that do change. This (and any) kind of invariance under a transformation is called a symmetry.

For example, in electromagnetism the electric and magnetic fields, E and B, are observable, while the potentials V ("voltage") and A (the vector potential) are not. Under a gauge transformation in which a constant is added to V, no observable change occurs in E or B.

With the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, and with successive advances in quantum field theory, the importance of gauge transformations has steadily grown. Gauge theories constrain the laws of physics, because all the changes induced by a gauge transformation have to cancel each other out when written in terms of observable quantities. Over the course of the 20th century, physicists gradually realized that all forces (fundamental interactions) arise from the constraints imposed by local gauge symmetries, in which case the transformations vary from point to point in space and time. Perturbative quantum field theory (usually employed for scattering theory) describes forces in terms of force mediating particles called gauge bosons. The nature of these particles is determined by the nature of the gauge transformations. The culmination of these efforts is the Standard Model, a quantum field theory explaining all of the fundamental interactions except gravity.