From physical symmetries to emergent gauge symmetries

Understand

Gauge symmetries indicate redundancies in the description of the relevant degrees of freedom of a given field theory and restrict the nature of observable quantities.

• One of the problems faced by emergent theories of relativistic fields is to understand how gauge symmetries can show up in systems that contain no trace of these symmetries at a more fundamental level.
• In this paper we start a systematic study aimed to establish a satisfactory mathematical and physical picture of this issue, dealing first with abelian field theories.
• We discuss how the trivialization, due to the decoupling and lack of excitation of some degrees of freedom, of the Noether currents associated with physical symmetries leads to emergent gauge symmetries in specific situations.