| Autor: |
Gomes, Henrique, Riello, Aldo |
| Rok vydání: |
2020 |
| Předmět: |
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| Druh dokumentu: |
Working Paper |
| Popis: |
The eliminative view of gauge degrees of freedom -- the view that they arise solely from descriptive redundancy and are therefore eliminable from the theory -- is a lively topic of debate in the philosophy of physics. Recent work attempts to leverage properties of the QCD $\theta_{\text{YM}}$-term to provide a novel argument against the eliminative view. The argument is based on the claim that the QCD $\theta_{\text{YM}}$-term changes under "large" gauge transformations. Here we review geometrical propositions about fiber bundles that unequivocally falsify these claims: the $\theta_{\text{ YM}}$-term encodes topological features of the fiber bundle used to represent gauge degrees of freedom, but it is fully gauge-invariant. Nonetheless, within the essentially classical viewpoint pursued here, the physical role of the $\theta_{\text{YM}}$-term shows the physical importance of bundle topology (or superpositions thereof) and thus weighs against (a naive) eliminativism. |
| Databáze: |
arXiv |
| Externí odkaz: |
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