BRST Symmetric Gaugeon Formalism for Higgs Model

TL;DR

This paper extends Yokoyama's gaugeon formalism to the Higgs model, providing a comprehensive gauge-fixing framework that encompasses various covariant gauges and analyzing the invariance of gauge parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a general gauge-fixing Lagrangian for the Higgs model within the gaugeon formalism, including the gaugeon fields and Faddeev-Popov ghosts, and examines gauge parameter shifts.

Findings

The formalism includes usual covariant and R_xi gauges as special cases.

The gauge parameter xi cannot be shifted in R_xi-like gauges.

The framework unifies different gauge choices within a single formalism.

Abstract

We reinvestigate Yokoyama's gaugeon formalism for the spontaneously broken Abelian gauge theory. Within the framework of the covariant linear gauges, we give a general gauge-fixing Lagrangian which includes the gauge field, the Goldstone mode, the multiplier B-field and Yokoyama's gaugeon fields (as well as Faddeev-Popov ghosts). As special choices of the values of the gauge-fixing parameters, our theory includes the usual covariant gauges and R$_\xi$-like gauges. Although some of the gauge-fixing parameters can be shifted by the q-number gauge transformation, the $\xi$ parameter cannot be shifted in any of the R$_\xi$-like gauges.