Extended connection in Yang-Mills theory (Q2517960)

Let \(\pi: P \to M\) be a principal \(G\)-bundle. The authors proposed a notion of extended connection \(A\) which is defined as the sum of two factors. The first factor is a universal family \(A^U\) parametrized by the space \(\mathcal A\) of connections in \(\pi\). The second factor is an arbitrary chosen connection \(\eta\) in \(\mathcal G\)-principal bundle \(\mathcal A \to\mathcal A/ \mathcal G\) , where \(\mathcal G\) is the gauge group. They show that the connection \(\eta\) encodes the ghost field that generates BRST complex. In a local trivialization the ghost field can be identified with the canonical vertical part of the connection \(\eta\), which corresponds to the Maurer-Cartan form of the gauge group. Alternatively, the ghost field can be considered as a universal connection in the gauge groups' Weil algebra. The connection \(\eta\) can then be defined as the image of this universal connection under a particular Chern-Weil homomorphism. The authors generalize the notion of gauge fixing by using a gauge fixing connection instead of section. By using Faddeev-Popov method, they apply the generalized gauge fixing to the path integral quantization of Yang-Mills theory.