Towards non-perturbative quantization and the mass gap problem for the Yang–Mills field

Abstract

In this paper, we reduce the problem of quantization of the Yang–Mills field Hamiltonian to a problem for defining a probability measure on an infinite-dimensional space of gauge equivalence classes of connections on [Formula: see text]. We suggest a formally self-adjoint expression for the quantized Yang–Mills Hamiltonian as an operator on the corresponding Lebesgue [Formula: see text]-space. In the case when the Yang–Mills field is associated to the abelian group [Formula: see text], we define the probability measure which depends on two real parameters [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. This yields a non-standard quantization of the Hamiltonian of the electromagnetic field, and the associated probability measure is Gaussian. The corresponding quantized Hamiltonian is a self-adjoint operator in a Fock space the spectrum of which is [Formula: see text], i.e. it has a gap.