Abstract: It has long been realized that the natural orbit space for non-abelian Yang-Mills dynamics is a positively curved (infinite dimensional) Riemannian manifold. Expanding on this result I.M. Singer proposed that strict positivity of the corresponding Ricci tensor (computable through zeta function regularization) could play a fundamental role in establishing that the associated Schroedinger operator admits a spectral gap. His argument was based on representing the (regularized) kinetic term in the Schroedinger operator as a Laplace-Beltrami operator on this positively curved orbit space. We revisit Singer's proposal and show how, when the contribution of the Yang-Mills potential energy is taken into account, the role of the original orbit space Ricci tensor is instead played by a Bakry-Emery Ricci tensor computable from the ground state wave functional of the quantum theory. We next review our ongoing Euclidean-signature-semi-classical program for deriving asymptotic expansions for such wave functionals and discuss how, by keeping the dynamical nonlinearities and non-abelian gauge invariances intact at each level of the analysis, our approach surpasses that of conventional perturbation theory for the generation of approximate wave functionals. Though our main focus is on Yang-Mills theory we derive the orbit space curvature for scalar electrodynamics and prove that, whereas the Maxwell factor remains flat, the interaction naturally induces positive curvature in the (charged) scalar factor of the resulting orbit space. This has led us to the conjecture that such orbit space curvature effects could furnish a source of mass for ordinary Klein-Gordon type fields provided the latter are (minimally) coupled to gauge fields, even in the abelian case. Finally we discuss the potential applicability of our Euclidean-signature program to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation of canonical quantum gravity.
