Yang-Mills theory and the Segal-Bargmann transform (Q1299952)

This long and detailed paper is devoted to a technical construction which is of relevance for canonically quantizing Yang-Mills theories on a spacetime cylinder with compact structure group \(K\). With the help of a scaled white-noise measure \({\widetilde{P}}_s\), the authors introduce an \(L^2\)-space \(L^2({\overline{\mathcal{A}}}, {\widetilde{P}}_s)\) over the space \({\overline{\mathcal{A}}}\) of connections on the spatial circle. Their main result is the construction of a unitary map (to be viewed as a variant of the Segal-Bargmann transform) from \(L^2({\overline{\mathcal{A}}}, {\widetilde{P}}_s)\) onto a holomorphic \(L^2\)-space over the space of complexified connections with a certain Gaussian measure. Roughly speaking, this transform is given by the `heat operator' \(e^{t \Delta _{\mathcal{A}} /2}\) followed by analytic continuation. Here \(\Delta _{\mathcal{A}}\) denotes the infinite dimensional Laplace operator which is defined on a certain subspace \({\mathcal{A}}\) of \({\overline{\mathcal{A}}}\). Moreover, the authors demonstrate that \(\Delta _{\mathcal{A}}\) reduces to \(\Delta _K\) on the gauge-trivial subspace. By letting the variance of the Gaussian measure tend to infinity this yields the desired result that \(- {1 \over 2} \Delta _K\) is the Hamiltonian and \(L^2(K)\) is the Hilbert space of the quantized Yang-Mills theory.