nLab ghost field

Contents

matter field fermions (spinors, Dirac fields)

flavors of fundamental fermions in the standard model of particle physics:
generation of fermions	1st generation	2nd generation	3d generation
quarks ( $q$ )
up-type	up quark ( $u$ )	charm quark ( $c$ )	top quark ( $t$ )
down-type	down quark ( $d$ )	strange quark ( $s$ )	bottom quark ( $b$ )
leptons
charged	electron	muon	tauon
neutral	electron neutrino	muon neutrino	tau neutrino

bound states:
mesons	light mesons: pion ( $u d$ ) ρ-meson ( $u d$ ) ω-meson ( $u d$ ) f1-meson a1-meson	strange-mesons: ϕ-meson ( $s \bar s$ ), kaon, K-meson ( $u s$ , $d s$ ) eta-meson ( $u u + d d + s s$ ) charmed heavy mesons*: D-meson ( $u c$ , $d c$ , $s c$ ) J/ψ-meson ( $c \bar c$ )	bottom heavy mesons: B-meson ( $q b$ ) ϒ-meson ( $b \bar b$ )
baryons	nucleons: proton $(u u d)$ neutron $(u d d)$

hadrons (bound states of the above quarks)

bosinos:

dark matter candidates

Exotica

auxiliary fields

Idea

In gauge theory the configuration space/phase space is not in general a smooth space, but a smooth groupoid: the gauge transformations between gauge fields are the morphisms of this groupoid.

The infinitesimal approximation to this smooth groupoid is a Lie algebroid. The dg-algebra of functions on this is called the BRST complex of the gauge theory. It contains in degree-0 the (duals to) the gauge fields and in degree-1 the cotangents to the gauge transformations. These degree-1 elements that appear here alongside the physical fields in degree 0 are called ghost fields in the physics literature.

If there are higher gauge transformations “gauge-of-gauge transformations” then the BRST complex has generators in higher degree, too, the cotangents to these higher gauge transformations. These are then called ghost-of-ghost fields.

For more details and further pointers see at BRST complex and in particular at BV-BRST formalism.

Last revised on December 9, 2017 at 15:05:57. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.