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div curl F= 0
May15-08, 01:47 PM
Dear All,

I'd be grateful for a bit of help with the following problems:

Consider the Lagrangian:
\displaystyle \mathcal{L} = (\partial_{\mu} \phi) (\partial^{\mu} \phi^{\dagger}) - m^2 \phi^{\dagger} \phi
where \phi = \phi(x^{\mu})

Now making a U(1) gauge transformation:
\displaystyle \phi \longmapsto e^{i \Lambda(x^{\mu})} \phi

does the Lagrangian become:

\displaystyle \mathcal{L} = (\partial_{\mu} \phi) \cdot (\partial^{\mu} \phi^{\dagger}) - m^2 \phi^{\dagger} \phi + \phi \phi^{\dagger} (\partial_{\mu} \Lambda) \cdot (\partial^{\mu} \Lambda) + i \partial_{\mu} \Lambda \cdot (\phi \partial^{\mu} \phi^{\dagger} - \phi^{\dagger} \partial^{\mu} \phi) ?

I realise you can add in another field to counteract the gauge transformation so the Lagrangian becomes gauge invariant, but how exactly would you determine the field to "add in" by inspection?

Thanks for any replies

lbrits
May15-08, 04:36 PM
Uhm, looks right. The point of gauge invariance is that you want a gauge transformation that commutes with the derivative. In other words, if
\phi \to g \phi,
then
\partial_\mu \phi \to g \partial_\mu \phi + (\partial_\mu g) \phi
whereas we would like covariance:
D_\mu \phi \to g D_\mu \phi
which implies that
D_\mu \to g D_\mu g^{-1} (the derivative now acts on everything to its right).

div curl F= 0
May15-08, 04:54 PM
Thanks for your reply lbrits.

That transformation: D_{\mu} \to g D_{\mu} g^{-1}
looks suspiciously like an equivalence relation from group theory?

lbrits
May15-08, 05:02 PM
Yes, g X g^{-1} is group action in the adjoint representation.