Quantal Noether Identities and Their Applications

Abstract

Based on the phase-space generating functional of the Green function for a system with a regular/singular Lagrangian, the quantal canonical Noether identities (NI) under the local and non-local transformation in extended phase have been derived, respectively. The result holds true whether the Jacobian of the transformation is equal to unity or not. Based on the configuration-space generating functional of the gauge-invariant system obtained by using Faddeev-Popov (FP) trick, the quantal NI under the local and non-local transformation in configuration space have been also deduced. It is showed that for a system with a singular Lagriangian one must use the effective action in the quantal NI instead of the classical action in corresponding classical NI. It is pointed out that in certain cases, the quantal NI may be converted into the quantal (weak) conservation laws by using the quantal equations of motion. This algorithm to derive the quantal conservation laws differs from the quantal first Noether theorem. The preliminary applications of this formulation to Yang-Mills (YM) fields and non-Abelian Chern-Simons (CS) theories are given. The quantal conserved quantities for non-local transformation in YM fields are obtained. The conserved BRS and PBRS quantities at the quantum level in non-Abelian CS theories are also found. The property of fractional spin in CS theories is discussed.