NON-ABELIAN GAUGE THEORIES AS A CONSEQUENCE OF PERTURBATIVE QUANTUM GAUGE INVARIANCE

Abstract

We show for the case of interacting massless vector bosons, how the structure of Yang–Mills theories emerges automatically from a more fundamental concept, namely perturbative quantum gauge invariance. It turns out that the coupling in a non-Abelian gauge theory is necessarily of Yang–Mills type plus divergence- and coboundary-couplings. The extension of the method to massive gauge theories is briefly discussed.