Simetrias globais e locais em teorias de calibre

Abstract

This thesis deals with the geometric formulation of classical gauge theories, or Yang-Mills theories, regarded as an important class of models that must be included in any attempt to establish a general mathematical framework for classical field theory. Such a formulation must come in (at least) two variants: the hamiltonian version which has gone through a phase of rapid development during the last 10-15 years, leading to what is now known as the “multisymplectic formalism”, and the more traditional lagrangian version studied in this thesis. The main motivation justifying this kind of investigation is that gauge theories constitute the most important examples of dynamical systems that are highly relevant in physics and where the equivalence between the lagrangian and the hamiltonian version, which for non-singular systems is established through the Legendre transformation, is far from obvious, since gauge theories are degenerate systems from the lagrangian point of view and are constrained systems from the hamiltonian point of view. This characteristic property of gauge theories is a direct consequence of their high degree of symmetry, that is, of gauge invariance. However, in a fully geometric formulation of classical field theory, capable of incorporating topologically non-trivial situations, invariance under local gauge transformations (gauge transformations of the second kind) and, surprisingly, even invariance under the corresponding global symmetry transformations (gauge transformations of the first kind) cannot be described adequately in terms of Lie groups and their actions on manifolds but requires the introduction and systematic use of a new concept, namely Lie group bundles and their actions on fiber bundles (over the same base manifold). The main goal of the present thesis is to take the first steps in developing adequate mathematical tools for handling this new concept of symmetry and, as a first application, give a simple clear-cut definition for the prescription of “minimal coupling” and a simple proof of Utiyama s theorem, according to which lagrangians for gauge potentials (connections) that are gauge invariant and of first order, i.e., depend only on the gauge potentials themselves and on their partial derivatives up to first order, are necessarily functions of the gauge field strengths (i.e., the curvature tensor) invariant under the corresponding global symmetry transformations.