BRST gauge fixing and regularization Original Research Article

In the presence of consistent regulators, the standard procedure of BRST gauge fixing (or moving from one gauge to another) can require non-trivial modifications. These modifications occur at the quantum level, and gauges exist which are only well-defined when quantum mechanical modifications are correctly taken into account. We illustrate how this phenomenon manifests itself in the solvable case of two-dimensional bosonization in the path integral formalism. As a by-product, we show how to derive smooth bosonization in Batalin-Vilkovisky Lagrangian BRST quantization.