Infinitely many conservation laws in self-dual Yang--Mills theory

Abstract

Using a nonlocal field transformation for the gauge field known as Cho--Faddeev--Niemi--Shabanov decomposition as well as ideas taken from generalized integrability, we derive a new family of infinitely many conserved currents in the self-dual sector of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory. These currents may be related to the area preserving diffeomorphisms on the reduced target space. The calculations are performed in a completely covariant manner and, therefore, can be applied to the self-dual equations in any space-time dimension with arbitrary signature.