Abstract
The advent of the dimensional-regularization procedure allows the study of renormalizability of spontaneously broken gauge theories formulated in a wide class of gauges. We derive and study the Ward-Takahashi identities appropriate to such gauges. A consequence of the Ward-Takahashi identities is that the physical matrix is invariant under a variation of the gauge condition. As remarked before, since the variation of a parameter in the -gauge formulation shifts the masses of unphysical excitations, the above result, the independence of the physical matrix, implies that the unphysical excitations cannot contribute to the sum over intermediate states, establishing the unitarity of the matrix. We also give the renormalization procedure of a model formulated in the gauge.
- Received 30 October 1972
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.7.1049
©1973 American Physical Society