Massive gauge bosons from the conservation of topological winding numbers

1999/09/28 by Weinzierl, Stefan
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/9909525

Abstract

We consider a U(1) x SU(2) gauge theory on the four-dimensional manifold S¹ x S³. If we make the assumption that only gauge transformations connected to the identity are allowed, the winding numbers of U(1) around S¹ and of SU(2) around S³ become topological conserved quantities. We derive the effective theory for non-trivial winding numbers if all distances are small compared to the radii of the spheres. In the non-abelian case the gauge bosons become massive.

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