Talk:BRST Quantization
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While I have learnt BRST methods elsewhere, this article presents it from a novel viewpoint that I am not familiar with. Unfortanately, it is also vague and confusing enough that I can't quite grasp what the author means.
- It's still very much in draft, and I anticipate that once it is a bit more complete (I have more transcribing to do) I will edit it down drastically. In the meantime, specific suggestions are very much welcome. Michael K. Edwards 23:22, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
- Also, I have no intention of presenting a "novel viewpoint". It is true that first-year QFT textbooks, even good ones, tend to do a poor job of articulating the significance of the BRST formalism. But it seems that most active researchers on both the mathematical and physical sides of the fence have been aware of the importance of BRST cohomology in gauge theories since at least the late 80's. There are several perspectives from which a "vanilla" encyclopedia article could be written, and the geometrical perspective which I prefer may not be the most current at the moment; but I don't think there's anything controversial or original about the main line of my exposition. (Verbose yes; controversial no.) And I have so far resisted the temptation to load the dice by using the elegant but unconventional language of the Frölicher-Nijenhuis calculus to talk about the relationship between the BRST operator and the "covariant exterior derivative" on a local section of the gauge bundle. Michael K. Edwards 05:09, 4 September 2006 (UTC)