1993/09/30 by Damiano Anselmi · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0264-9381/11/9/005
published as Class.Quant.Grav. 11 (1994) 2181-2204 · 31 pages, LaTeX, SISSA/ISAS 147/93/EP (An alternative proof of a lemma in sect. V has been added. Minor changes in some comments in Introduction and sections IV and V. References added.)
arxiv created 1993/10/28 · openalex publication_date 1994/09/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We show how to remove the divergences in an arbitrary gauge-field theory (possibly nonrenormalizable, i.e. involving infinitely many parameters) in the contex of the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism. We show that this can be achieved by performing, order by order in the loop expansion, a redefinition of the parameters of the classical Lagrangian (possibly infinitely many) and a canonical transformation (in the sense of Batalin and Vilkovisky) of fields and BRS sources. Gauge-invariance is turned into a suitable quantum generalization of BRS invariance. We define quantum observables in this formal context and study their properties. We show the independence of the on-shell physical amplitudes from gauge fixing. We apply the result to renormalizable gauge-field theories that are gauge-fixed with a non-renormalizable gauge fixing and prove that their predictivity is retained. A corollary is that topological field theories are predictive.