# nLab Yang-Mills theory

## Surveys, textbooks and lecture notes

#### Differential cohomology

differential cohomology

# Contents

## Idea

Yang–Mills theory is a gauge theory on a given 4-dimensional (pseudo-)Riemannian manifold $X$ whose field is the Yang–Mills field – a cocycle $\nabla \in \mathbf{H}(X,\bar \mathbf{B}U(n))$ in differential nonabelian cohomology represented by a vector bundle with connection – and whose action functional is

$\nabla \mapsto \frac{1}{g^2 }\int_X F_\nabla \wedge \star F_\nabla + i \theta \int_X F_\nabla \wedge F_\nabla$

for

## Quantization

Despite its fundamental role in the standard model of particle physics, various details of the quantization of Yang-Mills theory are still open. See at quantization of Yang-Mills theory.

## Applications

All gauge fields in the standard model of particle physics as well as in GUT models are Yang–Mills fields.

The matter fields in the standard model are spinors charged under the Yang-Mills field. See

## References

### General

Yang-Mills theory is named after the article

which was the first to generalize the principle of electromagnetism to a non-abalian gauge group. This became accepted as formulation of QCD and weak interactions (only) after spontaneous symmetry breaking (the Higgs mechanism) was understood in the 1960s.

For modern reviews of the basics see

See also the references at QCD, gauge theory, and super Yang-Mills theory.

• Simon Donaldson, Floer homology groups in Yang-Mills theory Cambridge University Press (2002) (pdf)

For the relation to Tamagawa numbers see

• Aravind Asok, Brent Doran, Frances Kirwan, Yang-Mills theory and Tamagawa numbers (arXiv:0801.4733)

### Classical solutions

Wu and Yang (1968) found a static solution to the sourceless $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills equations. Recent references include

• J. A. O. Marinho, O. Oliveira, B. V. Carlson, T. Frederico, Revisiting the Wu-Yang Monopole: classical solutions and conformal invariance

There is an old review,

• Alfred Actor, Classical solutions of $SU(2)$ Yang—Mills theories, Rev. Mod. Phys. 51, 461–525 (1979),

that provides some of the known solutions of $SU(2)$ gauge theory in Minkowski (monopoles, plane waves, etc) and Euclidean space (instantons and their cousins). For general gauge groups one can get solutions by embedding $SU(2)$’s. For instantons the most general solution is known, first worked out by

for the classical groups SU, SO , Sp, and then by

• C. Bernard, N. Christ, A. Guth, E. Weinberg, Pseudoparticle Parameters for Arbitrary Gauge Groups, Phys. Rev. D16, 2977 (1977)

for exceptional groups. The latest twist on the instanton story is the construction of solutions with non-trivial holonomy:

• Thomas C. Kraan, Pierre van Baal, Periodic instantons with nontrivial holonomy, Nucl.Phys. B533 (1998) 627-659, hep-th/9805168

There is a nice set of lecture notes

on topological solutions with different co-dimension (instantons, monopoles, vortices, domain walls). Note, however, that except for instantons these solutions typically require extra scalars and broken U(1)’s, as one may find in super Yang-Mills theories.

Some of the material used here has been taken from

Another model featuring Yang-Mills fields has been proposed by Curci and Ferrari, see Curci-Ferrari model.

Revised on February 6, 2014 12:57:41 by Urs Schreiber (89.204.130.13)