Higgs fields induced by Yang–Mills type Lagrangians on gauge-natural prolongations of principal bundles

Abstract

We address some new issues concerning spontaneous symmetry breaking. We define classical Higgs fields for gauge-natural invariant Yang–Mills type Lagrangian field theories through the requirement of the existence of canonical covariant gauge-natural conserved quantities. As an illustrative example, we consider the ‘gluon Lagrangian’, i.e. a Yang–Mills Lagrangian on the [Formula: see text]-order gauge-natural bundle of [Formula: see text]-principal connections, and canonically define a ‘gluon’ classical Higgs field through the split reductive structure induced by the kernel of the associated gauge-natural Jacobi morphism.