On the decomposition theorem for gluons

Abstract

Recently, the problem of spin and orbital angular momentum (AM) separation has widely been discussed. Nowadays, all discussions about the possibility to separate the spin AM from the orbital AM in the gauge invariant manner are based on the ansatz that the gluon field can be presented in form of the decomposition where the physical gluon components are additive to the pure gauge gluon components, i.e. $A_\mu = A_\mu^{\text{phys}}+A_\mu^{\text{pure}}$. In the present paper, we show that in the non-Abelian gauge theory this gluon decomposition has a strong mathematical evidence in the frame of the contour gauge conception. In other words, we reformulate the gluon decomposition ansatz as a theorem on decomposition and, then, we use the contour gauge to prove this theorem. In the first time, we also demonstrate that the contour gauge possesses the special kind of residual gauge related to the boundary field configurations and expressed in terms of the pure gauge fields. As a result, the trivial boundary conditions lead to the inference that the decomposition includes the physical gluon configurations only provided the contour gauge condition.