= Yang-Mills vacuum
{c}
{title2=$F_{ij}=0$}
= Yang-Mills vacua
{c}
{synonym}
A classical zero-energy Yang-Mills vacuum has vanishing spatial gauge curvature. On simply connected space it is pure gauge, $A=h^{-1}dh$. If gauge transformations approach the identity at spatial infinity, the boundary-normalized gauge maps on compactified space $S^3$ have integer winding, recorded by the <Chern-Simons number of a gauge field>. Transformations of nonzero winding relate these representatives; quantum theta states encode their tunnelling and large-gauge-transformation phases.
Back to article page
