Local symmetries appear to be a synonym to internal symmetry, see description at: Section "Internal and spacetime symmetries".
A local symmetry is a transformation that you apply a different transformation for each point, instead of a single transformation for every point.
Bibliography:
- lecture 3
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48188/local-and-global-symmetries
- www.physics.rutgers.edu/grad/618/lects/localsym.pdf by Joel Shapiro gives one nice high level intuitive idea:
- Quora:
More precisely, each generator of the corresponding Lie algebra leads to one separate conserved current, such that a single symmetry can lead to multiple conserved currents.
This is basically the local symmetry version of Noether's theorem.
Then to maintain charge conservation, we have to maintain local symmetry, which in turn means we have to add a gauge field as shown at Video "Deriving the qED Lagrangian by Dietterich Labs (2018)".
Bibliography:
- photonics101.com/relativistic-electrodynamics/gauge-invariance-action-charge-conservation#show-solution has a good explanation of the Gauge transformation. TODO how does that relate to symmetry?
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/57901/noether-theorem-gauge-symmetry-and-conservation-of-charge
This important and common simple case has easy properties.
S page 146.
For this sub-case, we can define the Lie algebra of a Lie group as the set of all matrices such that for all :If we fix a given and vary , we obtain a subgroup of . This type of subgroup is known as a one parameter subgroup.
The immediate question is then if every element of can be reached in a unique way (i.e. is the exponential map a bijection). By looking at the matrix logarithm however we conclude that this is not the case for real matrices, but it is for complex matrices.
TODO example it can be seen that the Lie algebra is not closed matrix multiplication, even though the corresponding group is by definition. But it is closed under the Lie bracket operation.
Because the Lie bracket has to be a bilinear map, all we need to do to specify it uniquely is to specify how it acts on every pair of some basis of the Lie algebra.
Then, together with the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula and the Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence, this forms an exceptionally compact description of a Lie group.
Intuition, please? Example? mathoverflow.net/questions/278641/intuition-for-symplectic-groups The key motivation seems to be related to Hamiltonian mechanics. The two arguments of the bilinear form correspond to each set of variables in Hamiltonian mechanics: the generalized positions and generalized momentums, which appear in the same number each.
Seems to be set of matrices that preserve a skew-symmetric bilinear form, which is comparable to the orthogonal group, which preserves a symmetric bilinear form. More precisely, the orthogonal group has:and its generalization the indefinite orthogonal group has:where S is symmetric. So for the symplectic group we have matrices Y such as:where A is antisymmetric. This is explained at: www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucahad0/7302_handout_13.pdf They also explain there that unlike as in the analogous orthogonal group, that definition ends up excluding determinant -1 automatically.
Therefore, just like the special orthogonal group, the symplectic group is also a subgroup of the special linear group.
general linear group over a finite field of order . Remember that due to the classification of finite fields, there is one single field for each prime power .
Exactly as over the real numbers, you just put the finite field elements into a matrix, and then take the invertible ones.
This is a good first concrete example of a Lie algebra. Shown at Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 4.2 "How to linearize a Lie Group" has an example.
Every element with this parametrization has determinant 1:Furthermore, any element can be reached, because by independently settting , and , , and can have any value, and once those three are set, is fixed by the determinant.
Remembering that the Lie bracket of a matrix Lie group is really simple, we can then observe the following Lie bracket relations between them:
One key thing to note is that the specific matrices , and are not really fundamental: we could easily have had different matrices if we had chosen any other parametrization of the group.
TODO confirm: however, no matter which parametrization we choose, the Lie bracket relations between the three elements would always be the same, since it is the number of elements, and the definition of the Lie bracket, that is truly fundamental.
Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 4.2 "How to linearize a Lie Group" then calculates the exponential map of the vector as:with:
TODO now the natural question is: can we cover the entire Lie group with this exponential? Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 7 "EXPonentiation" explains why not.
Just like for the finite general linear group, the definition of special also works for finite fields, where 1 is the multiplicative identity!
Note that the definition of orthogonal group may not have such a clear finite analogue on the other hand.
The group of all transformations that preserve some bilinear form, notable examples:
- orthogonal group preserves the inner product
- unitary group preserves a Hermitian form
- Lorentz group preserves the Minkowski inner product
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
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