Internal symmetries of non-Abelian gauge field configurations

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Abstract
In a topologically nontrivial gauge theory not all gauge transformations are symmetries (as defined by Forgács and Manton and by Schwarz) of a given field configuration: first, there may be an obstruction to implement gauge transformations on the fields; next, even those transformations which can be implemented may fail to be symmetries. For a test particle in such a background field, those gauge transformations which are symmetries generate ordinarily conserved Noether currents, one of which is the usual electric current. These results shed a new light on the problem of ‘‘global color’’ in monopole theory and explain why the electric charge of a nucleon is not in general conserved in the non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm experiment of Wu and Yang.

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