Plasmons, Gauge Invariance, and Mass

Abstract

Schwinger has pointed out that the Yang-Mills vector boson implied by associating a generalized gauge transformation with a conservation law (of baryonic charge, for instance) does not necessarily have zero mass, if a certain criterion on the vacuum fluctuations of the generalized current is satisfied. We show that the theory of plasma oscillations is a simple nonrelativistic example exhibiting all of the features of Schwinger's idea. It is also shown that Schwinger's criterion that the vector field $m\ensuremath{\ne}0$ implies that the matter spectrum before including the Yang-Mills interaction contains $m=0$, but that the example of superconductivity illustrates that the physical spectrum need not. Some comments on the relationship between these ideas and the zero-mass difficulty in theories with broken symmetries are given.