1. Introduction
In Classical Covariant Field Theory two desirable conditions are required for a family of observables: In one side we require this function to separate solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations. On the other hand, we need the Jacobi identity in order to have a Lie (Poisson) bracket. It is a known problem to characterize those theories accomplishing these two requirements, as pointed out in [
1,
2] and others. There are two main difficulties. On one hand, under locality assumptions, Jacobi identity is well established but generically there are few observables associated with conservation laws given by Noether’s First Theorem, see for instance [
3]. On the other hand, extending to non-locality of variations of solutions, we may provide enough observables, see for instance [
4,
5], nevertheless the Jacobi identity does not necessarily hold, see [
6].
For linear theories there are no such difficulties, and vector fields in the space of solutions can be modeled as in Theorem 2, see also [
7]. For instance, in Lorentzian globally hyperbolic spacetimes, Maxwell equations [
8] exhibit a family of observables, related to the Aharomov-Bohm effect, and a Poisson bracket constructed with Peierls method for local variables. We provide a similar set of observables for the abelian Yang-Mills (YM) fields on Riemannian manifolds. This could be mentioned as the novelty introduced in this work, although our aim is to prepare the scenario for non-abelian (non-linear) YM fields. We adopt the Lagrangian approach of the variational bicomplex formalism, see [
9,
10,
11] rather than the Hamiltonian multysimplectic formalism approach to describe non abelian YM fields, see [
12,
13].
We consider regions
U with smooth boundary
both contained in a
n-dimensional Riemannian manifold, usually
. Here we avoid the complications of corners in
which will be treated elsewhere. For a principal bundle we take solutions of the Yang-Mills (YM) equations for the abelian
structure group. We are interested in defining a family of observables for YM solutions in
U,
, of the integral form
defined for a 3-dimensional compact Riemannian
admissible smooth hypersurface
with volume form
, where admissibility means
, see [
14].
Observable currents, are horizontal
-forms,
, in the
jet bundle
associated to sections of the affine bundle
of connections. The local invariance condition is then assumed by imposing
, when restricted to the locus of the YM equations
.
is the horizontal differential, see the notation of the variational bicomplex formalism in
Appendix A. We adapt helicity for hypersurfaces embedded properly in general compact regions
U, rather than considering cylinder regions with space-like slices,
, this is related to the General Boundary Formalism for field theories, see [
15] and references therein.
The idea is to define the relative helicity from hydrodynamics properly adapted to YM fields as a local observable. In order to motivate this definition we recall the notion of helicity from magneto-hydrodynamics. For a divergence (non-autonomous) free vector field,
in a three-dimensional Riemannian manifold
tangent to the boundary
, helicity is defined as
where one considers the vector field
, as a potential in
. Helicity of
measures globally the degree of self-linking of its flow. Helicity remains an invariant for every
-preserving diffeomorphism of
that carries the boundary
into itself, where
is given by the volume form on
. The situation can be dually described in terms of 1-forms. If
where
is the Riemannian metric on
, then under the additional topological condition,
, there exists a potential
such that
. Here helicity reads as
It does depend just on the vorticity although for its definition the potential 1-form or the vector field v, respectively, may intervene.
If we adopt
divergence-free or
respectively, then the property of
isovorticity holds for
for the magnetic potential, as well as for any solution of the Euler equation of hydrodynamics. This means that
can be constructed as the image of
under a diffeomorphism and if we consider a space-time domain
, then helicity does not depend on the parameter
t of the non-autonomous flow. To review this concepts see for instance [
16,
17].
Under the assumption of simple connectednes of
, then the Lie algebra of divergence-free vector fields, have a bilinear form,
relative helicity, defined as
Notice that helicity is and also that is a symmetric bilinear form under the assumption of closedness for .
Considering YM solutions
, where
is a fixed connection and
is a 1-form in
M, we would like to define the
field strength helicity as in (
2). Choose a tubular neighborhood
of
with exponential coordinates
, with embedding
. We take
an
axial gauge fixing, that is a 1-form such that in
has no normal component. In addition, we may suppose that
, as well as
are divergence-free. See Appendix on the geometry of abelian YM fields in [
15].
Then the helicity for abelian YM fields could be defined as
where
is the Hodge operator associated to the induced Riemannian metric
on
. Hence we could define helicity as in (
1) for the vector fields
defined as
Nevertheless, this notion of helicity would depend on the gauge fixing choice, therefore
cannot be generalized as a gauge invariant observable. Moreover, we do not get a local
-closedness condition for an observable current: if
is an open region such that
, then
where
L is the Lagrangian density. We will rather try to define the
relative helicity of YM fields. Take
any other solution. Take a first variation of solutions
, let us define
Then for gauge translations
we would have
. Moreover, if
is an open region such that
, then
Thus for every couple
where
and
is a first variations of solutions, we consider the
antisymmetric component of the relative helicity or simply
-
helicity,
In
Section 4 we formalize this construction in the language of the variational bicomplex, see
Appendix A.
2. Variational Bicomplex Formalism for Abelian YM Fields
Along this section we adopt the terminology and notation of the variational bicomplex formalism, for the readers convenience we give a brief presentation and references for this in
Appendix A. Let
be a principal bundle on a Riemannian manifold
with structure group
and
a region with smooth boundary. Let
with
be the affine bundle whose sections
are the
G-covariant connections on
.
For abelian YM, the
Lagrangian density is defined by the Lagrangian
where this expresion corresponds to local coordinates
in
,
is a fixed volume form in the base and
, with
the Riemannian metric in
U.
Then
denote the Euler-Lagrange equations, where
stands for the basis for the vertical
—forms in
. Thus
YM equations have
locus which is the prolongation
of
. In the local coordinate chart,
The
space of solutions over
U is
Thus solutions satisfy .
The
linearized equations for any (local)
evolutionary vector field, are
where
is the
integration by parts operator, see its definition in [
18]. In local coordinates this linearized equation reads as
Let
be the Lie subalgebra of those evolutionary vector fields satisfying the linearized Euler-Lagrange equations. The Lie algebra
will turn out to be our model for
variations of YM solutions. For example, the radial evolutionary vector field
whose prolongation is
is a symmetry of the YM PDE, i.e.
. This is a general constructions of symmetries for linear PDEs, see [
5].
The
presymplectic current
with
, has the property stated in the following general Lemma.
Lemma 1 (Multysimplectic formula)
. For every we have Definition 1 (Gauge)
. - 1.
Those first variations of solutions satisfyingdefine the Lie subalgebra of locally Hamiltonian first variations
as . - 2.
We define the Lie algebra of gauge first variations
as those satisfying locally the presymplectic degeneracy condition, i.e.,
For instance, the radial vector
defined in (
6) is not locally hamiltonian, since it satisfies the Liouville condition
rather than condition (
7).
In the second part of Definition 1 we may also have adopted
instead of
and
as is stated in the following assertion.
Proposition 1. Suppose that satisfiesfor every variation of solutions . Then . Notice that the locally Hamiltonian condition is stronger than the property exhibited in Proposition 1 for every variation of solutions. Thus .
Lemma 2. is a Lie ideal.
Proof. If
then
which by hypothesis and by anticommutativity of
is
-exact, hence
and therefore
is a Lie subalgebra. To see that
, apply vertical derivation to (
8).
Take
, then
apply vertical derivation to Equation (
9) with
and the condition of
-exactness for
implies the
-exactness of
holds. Therefore
. □
Form Proposition 1 it follows also the following assertion.
Lemma 3. is a Lie ideal, hence
Lemma 4. If for every holds, then in local coordinates holds in for each where . Definition 2 (Gauge with boundary condition)
. - 1.
The Lie subalgebraof locally Hamiltonian first variations with null boundary conditions
, consists of those satisfying (7) andwhen evaluated in . In particular . - 2.
The Lie ideal of gauge variations with null boundary conditions
consists of those such that (8) holds together withWhich means that there is no gauge action in the boundary.
The following assertions are used in the definition.
Lemma 5. The following inclusions are Lie ideal inclusions into Lie algebras: Proof. imply that hence is indeed a Lie algebra. To see that it is an ideal in we just consider the fact that for every .
To see that
is an ideal in
, derive vertically (
8) and notice that
is null along
thanks to Lemma 4, in particular
is
-exact.
We claim that is an ideal of . For if then vanishes.
Finally, to see that
is an ideal,
is
-exact by (
9). □
3. Linear Theory
Recall that each fiber of is an affine bundle modeled over a linear bundle with .
Since the space of YM solutions
is an affine space, take a fixed connection
, then
is such that
. Here ★ denotes the Hodge star operator. In addition, there exists
such that
Even though Equation (
5) imposes a condition
on-shell, i.e., on
for
, the linearized equations,
, induce
that satisfies (
5)
off-shell, that is in
.
As a complementary definition to (
10) we may define for every solution,
, and every first variation of solutions,
the section
Here we use the isomorphism, depending on a fixed connection, , between the pullback of the vertical bundle , and the linear bundle .
For the previous definitions the following properties hold
The following assertion holds as an observation that will follow from Lemma 9.
Lemma 6. We have that for every solution of the linearized equation . Hence, for every .
The following assertion holds for linear theories.
Lemma 7. For every solution, , and every first variation of solutions, , in a linear theory, there exists such that or equivalently
If we want to consider the gauge classes on
we can consider the gauge representatives consisting of
Lorentz gauge fixing conditions, i.e., for every
there exists a gauge related
where
being a gauge translation by exact 1-forms in
.
Recall the Hodge-Morrey-Friedrichs
-ortogonal decomposition, see [
19]. For null normal components we have,
where
Given a fixed point,
, the linear space of Lorentz gauge fixing,
, defines a linear subspace
of linearized solutions,
, such that there is a covering,
,
of the
-component
space of solutions modulo gauge,.
The following results of this section recover the usual characterizations of gauge symmetries in as translations by exact forms.
Lemma 8. For every and , .
Proof. If we calculate the square of the
-norm,
of
where ★ stands for the Hodge star operator for the Riemannian metric
g, then we get
If
,
then due to Lemma 4, the norm
can be calculated as
Recall (
8) and that
. Hence
Therefore . □
Proposition 2. For every solution, and every gauge first variation with null boundary condition, , the induced 1-form in the base, , defined as in (11), is exact. Therefore, . Proof. We solve the Poisson BVP for
with Dirichlet boundary conditions
Notice that the necessary integral condition for the Poisson equation follows from the boundary condition .
Thus is a solution of with Lorentz gauge fixing condition and Dirichlet boundary condition.
Recall (
13). Since
, according to Lemma 8,
and
.
There are two cases:
Case 1. The normal component does not vanish. Here in local coordinates, . Then is harmonic and ). Therefore, it belongs to i.e., it is exact.
Case 2.
, that is,
. Then
, i.e.,
where
In any case is exact and so is . □
Proposition 3. Take any solution η, and any gauge symmetry, . Then there exists such that . Hence is exact.
Proof. Take . According to the argument given in Proposition 2 we just need to show that the pullback is null for the inclusion . Then would have null Dirichlet condition and would be exact for suitable .
Notice that the following boundary conditions are in general different objects:
Since , then we are assuming a boundary condition on X, namely , with , when evaluating in . Due to Lemma 4 we have that does not depend on vertical coordinates, when evaluating in .
We claim that indeed
. Recall that, according to Lemma 4, for every
we have
Therefore,
for
, hence null Dirichlet boundary conditions hold for
. There exists a smooth function
such that
, and
. If
then
has null both Neumann and Dirichlet conditions on
. We just need to refine the choice of
f, so that
. Hence
. □
Theorem 1. There is an inclusion of the gauge quotients of Lie algebras, Proof. By the Second Isomorphism Theorem for Lie algebras
Notice that
where
is the Lie algebra morphism defined as the composition in the diagram below.
By the first isomorphism theorem, there exists an induced monomorphism
and a commutative diagram
There is an inclusion
. Hence
. By Proposition 3, the inclusion
is a section of the projection
, given by
.
Therefore, we have the required inclusion
□
Recall that
in the exact sequence,
Hence, the demand in the proof of Proposition 3 for to be null is equivalent to demanding to lie into . Thus, defines a relative cohomology class . Further considerations actually explain that .
Proposition 4. If , then .
Proof. For every
we have that
with
. Take
any YM solution. For
, we solve the Poisson BVP
then
may be gauge translated by an exact form
so that
has no normal components along
and satisfies
as well as the linearized YM equation,
.
Notice that the induced linearized solution in fact belongs to .
By (
13)
. For the coclosed projection
of
, we have the orthogonal decomposition,
.
Consider the
boundary conditions linear map,
, such that
where the codomain is the linear space of Dirichlet-Neumann boundary conditions modulo gauge,
See [
15] for further considerations of this space. Recall the isomorphisms
Since
then by (
16) we have
. Hence, the closed projection of
would have cohomology class
in
induced by
. Therefore,
is injective.
If we proceed as in the previous argument with
we can define an injective map
such that the following diagram commutes
Notice that and have the same image. □
Remark that we have the commutative diagram
where
with
the map of
boundary conditions of solutions modulo gauge, see [
15] for further properties of this map. Here we use axial gauge fixing in a tubular neighborhood of
as well as the linear map
is defined in (
17). The linear map
is induced by
where
is a coclosed linearized solution,
such that
, see notation (
11).
By composing the projection
with the map
we get the map
. Diagram (
18) suggests that
Hamiltonian first variation modulo gauge,
is a Lie algebra isomorphic as linear space to the tangent space of the moduli space
at
.
The following assertion related to Proposition 4 explains how the relative cohomology codifies the description of
with respect to the boundary conditions, see also [
15].
Proposition 5. if and only if is injective and is a linear isomorphism.
4. Poisson-Lie Algebra of Hamiltonian Observables
Definition 3 (Hamiltonian observable currents)
. We say that an observable current is a Hamiltonian observable current
if there exist and a residual form such that the following relation holds when restricted to and evaluated on , We denote the space of Hamiltonian observable currents over U as . The evolutionary vector field V, is actually a locally Hamiltonian first variation, i.e., . If in addition in (19) we have the boundary conditionthen we call F a Hamiltonian observable current with boundary condition
. Here . We denote the space of these kind of observable currents as . Definition 4 (Helicity current)
. Suppose that is a solution of the linearized YM equation, . Define the φ-helicity current
aswhere was defined in (6). More explicitly Form the very definition and the multysimplectic formula it can be seen that .
Remark that we could have defined observable currents,
, for
any divergence-free
in
U,
, with evolutionary Hamiltonian vector field,
, rather than in restricting ourselves to Hamiltonians first variations in
, just as the observables considered in [
8]. Nevertheless, if we had adopted this definition, then we would have to restrict the domain of
and evaluate only ob solutions
with Lorentz gauge fixing (
12),
in order to have local invariance
.
From the following assertion it follows that helicity currents are Hamiltonian observable currents restricted to U, that is .
Lemma 9. The φ-helicity current, defines a locally Hamiltonian observable current with Hamiltonian whenever .
Proof. Recall the notation in (
10). Notice that the relation
is valid off-shell. Therefore we have
in particular when evaluated on
. □
Lemma 10. If are solutions of , then the Lie derivative, lies in with Hamiltonian . Under integration over Σ, it yields the symplectic product observable
, associated to , Proof. Notice that
evaluated on
on Shell. On the other hand a general formula (
9) states that
Therefore
Recall that
, see for instance [
20] por the explicit form of the Lie bracket of evolutionary vector fields. Hence
is Hamiltonian first variation for
. □
Define the family of
-
helicity observables as
We see that
is related to the anti-symmetric component of the helicity as bilinear form, see
Section 1, in the sense of (
3). Notice also that
is not necessarily symmetric, unless
. Hence
not necessarily equals 0.
We say that
is a
Hamiltonian observable with
Hamiltonian first variation so that the following formal identity holds:
Let us explain the formal notation of (
21). Any first variation of solutions,
encodes a variation of any fixed solution
, which we denote as
,
for a one-parameter family of smooth solutions
This means that
.
In the r.h.s. we have an evaluation of a symplectic form,
While in the l.h.s. we have
With this notation we suggest that we are modeling a Lie derivative in the tangent space of the moduli space , while corresponds to local vector fields near .
If corresponds to a first variation of a one-parametric family of gauge equivalent solutions, , then which follows from . Thus is well defined for the gauge class .
Lemma 11. Consider the linear spacewhere is a constant function iff represent the same -class. Then is a Lie algebra with bracketwhich means Proof. Let
be 1-forms as in the hypothesis. As in the proof of Lemma 10, recall that
There are gauge translations
such that the gauge translations
are divergence-free, see for instance the Appendix [
15]. Recall that
are defined by
respectively. Hence
and
. By (
9)
Denote
as the a 1-form such that
. In local coordinates:
Recall that divergence-free vector fields form a Lie algebra, that is
. Then
Therefore,
for every variation of solutions
w associated to every
. See the explanation of the notation in (
21). Hence
□
We claim that
yields a family of local observables sufficiently rich to separate solutions, see also [
7]. Suppose that we consider a non-gauge variation
of a solution
. More precisely, take a one-parametric family of solutions
encoded by the symmetry
, that is
Without loss of generality we can also suppose that
with
. Hence, for any
, there exists
such that
in a suitable open
n-dimensional ball
. We choose an embedded
-dimensional ball,
such that
for
associated to
a non trivial solution to linearized equations in
that also vanishes in the exterior of
.
We then extend
to
such that
. The variation of
along
w in the space of YM solutions is
Remark that for every YM solution and for every variation , if , then and Thus we could change notation and index the family as where we take V in .
We summarize the results exposed in this section in the following result and regard the family of observables as a “Darboux local coordinate system” for our gauge field theory.
Theorem 2 (Darboux’s Theorem)
. Given a fixed YM solution. For each an admissible hypersurface, , with relative homology class , there exists an infinite dimensional gauge invariant Lie algebra (modulo constant functions)such that the following assertions hold: - 1.
is gauge invariant: If X is a variation of one-parametric family of gauge equivalent solutions then Moreover, depends just on the gauge -class, .
- 2.
Each variation V is in fact locally Hamiltonian, hence is an observable that satisfies the Hamilton’s equation (recall notation in (21)): - 3.
, locally separates solutions near η: For every non-gauge variation modeled by , there exists a locally Hamiltonian variation w modeled by and with
The following commutative diagram of Lie algebra morphisms and vertical exact sequences summarizes our results
where
denote subset of the the constant observable currents
with the additional boundary condition
,
.
Definition 5 (Poisson algebra)
. Let Σ be any admissible hypersurface . The (polynomial) Poisson algebra of helicity Hamiltonian observables
,is generated by the Lie algebra The proof of the following assertion follows from the fact that the space of boundary conditions of solutions,
, is a Lagrangian subspace with respect to the symplectic form
, see [
21].
Proposition 6. For a hypersurface (such that and for its complement, the corresponding observables uniquely define an observableassociated to the oriented and closed -dimensional boundary . The Lie algebra
will suffice to separate boundary conditions of solutions, while the Lie algebras
corresponding to
will be necessary if we want to separate solutions yielding the same boundary conditions, hence in the fibers of
. This happens when
according to Proposition 5. This also allows us to consider the fibers of
as the symplectic leafs the coisotropic linear space
. This image has been described in detail for the moduli space
of non-abelian YM solutions in the two dimensional case, see for instance [
22].
5. Gluing Observable Currents
Suppose that a region U is obtained by gluing along the closed hypersurfaces , to avoid corners case we suppose . This includes an isometry of with together with the compatibility of normal derivatives of the metric. We also suppose that the principal bundle over U is induced by the corresponding principal bundle over . From the projection map we fix base points obtained by gluing .
Suppose that
satisfy the continuity gluing condition along
and denote those couples
satisfying (
26) as
, where
. It is a Lie subalgebra of
. The continuity gluing condition (
26) is trivially satisfied for the gauge Lie algebras so that
, hence there is a well defined Lie algebra
Let
denote those gauge variations whose jet vanish along the boundary components of
except for
. Similarly define
. If we define
then by an Isomorphism Theorem for Lie algebras,
There is a commutative diagram of linear maps as follows. Recall the gluing procedure for abelian YM, see [
15]. The doted arrow is a Lie algebra morphism.
From the Lagrangian embedding of
with respect to the symplectic structure,
it follows that the Dirichlet conditions along
and
completely determine the Neumann conditions in
and
respectively. Here we consider an axial gauge fixing for solutions in
satisfying also the Lorentz gauge fixing condition in
, see Appendix in [
15]. This means that the continuous gluing condition (
26) will suffice to reconstruct modulo gauge the first variation
for
disregarding the normal derivatives along
. This proves the following assertion.
Theorem 3 (Gluing of symmetries modulo gauge)
. There is an isomorpmhism of Lie algebras