Fields, statistics and non-Abelian gauge groups

Abstract

We examine field theories with a compact groupG of exact internal gauge symmetries so that the superselection sectors are labelled by the inequivalent irreducible representations ofG. A particle in one of these sectors obeys a parastatistics of orderd if and only if the corresponding representation ofG isd-dimensional. The correspondence between representations of the observable algebra and representations ofG extends to a mapping of the intertwining operators for these representations preserving linearity, tensor products and conjugation. Although we assume no explicit commutation property between fields, the commutation relations of fields of the same irreducible tensor character underG at spacelike separations are largely determined by the statistics parameter of the corresponding sector. For fields of conjugate irreducible tensor character the observable part of the commutator (anticommutator) vanishes at spacelike separations if the corresponding sector has para-Bose (para-Fermi) statistics.