Local non-abelian gauge symmetry of the Hubbard model

Abstract

It is shown that the field operators of an electron system on a lattice can be decomposed into direct products of two kinds of operators acting in two separate Hilbert spaces. The Hilbert space of electron states thus becomes a direct product of two Hilbert spaces. By this fact a certain class of electron systems exhibits a formal separation of charge and spin degrees of freedom into two kinds of elementary excitations. A typical example of such a system is given by the Hubbard model. The separation of charge and spin resulting from the new representation of the field operators can be considered as a rigorous realization and generalization of an idea expressed by Anderson concerning the separation of spin and charge degrees of freedom in strongly correlated electron systems. The new representation of electron field operators implies the existence of a localU(2) gauge symmetry in the theory. The theory of superconductivity based on the Hubbard model is then represented by a non-abelian gauge field theory.