Spontaneously broken gauge symmetries. II. Perturbation theory and renormalization

Abstract

The second paper in this series is devoted to the formulation of a renormalizable perturbation theory of Higgs phenomena (spontaneously broken gauge theories). In Sec. II, we reformulate the renormalization prescription for massless Yang-Mills theories in terms of gauge-invariant renormalization counterterms in the action. Section III gives a group-theoretic discussion of Higgs phenomena. We discuss the possibility that an asymmetric vacuum is stable, and show how the symmetry of the physical vacuum determines the mass spectrum of the gauge bosons. We show further that in a special gauge (U gauge), all unphysical fields can be eliminated. Section IV discusses the quantization of a spontaneously broken gauge theory in the R gauge, where, as we show in Sec. V, Green's functions are made finite by the renormalization counterterms of the symmetric theory (in which the gauge invariance is not spontaneously broken). The R-gauge formulation makes use of redundant fields for the sake of renormalizability. Section VI is a discussion of the low-energy limits of propagators in the R-gauge formulation. In Sec. VII we show that the particles associated with redundant fields peculiar to the R-gauge formulation are unphysical, i.e., they do not contribute to the sum over intermediate states. © 1972 The American Physical Society.