Fibre bundles and Yang-Mills fields

Abstract

Since 1954, when Yang and Mills [7] presented their idea of isotopic gauge transformation, the method of introducing interactions into field theories by using general gauge invariance has been extensively studied.A general formalism was presented by Utiyama [6]. Reference [6] also contains the first application of the formalism to the theory of gravitation. A more general approach to the Young-Mills formalism applied to general relativity was described by Kibble [3]. In a special case of interacting Dirac field the gauge invariance group can still be enlarged, leading to the possibility of describing short-range interactions together with gravitation and electromagnetism [5]. It is, therefore important to have a definite formulation of the common geometrical content of such theories.