Quantisation and Gauge Invariance

Abstract

Recent developments concerning canonical quantisation and gauge invariant quantum mechanical systems and quantum field theories are briefly discussed. On the one hand, it is shown how diffeomorphic covariant representations of the Heisenberg algebra over curved manifolds of non trivial topology involve topology classes of flat U(1) bundles. On the other hand, through some examples, the recently proposed physical projector approach to the quantisation of general gauge invariant systems is shown to avoid the necessity of any gauge fixing - hence also avoiding the possibility of Gribov problems which usually ensue any gauge fixing procedure - and is also capable to provide the adequate description of the physical content of gauge invariant systems.