Global issues in gauge fixing

Abstract

We review the global issues associated to gauge fixing ambiguities and their consequence for glueball spectroscopy. To avoid infrared singularities the theory is formulated in a finite volume. The examples of a cubic and spherical geometry will be discussed in some detail. Our methods are not powerful enough to study the infinite volume limit, but the results clearly indicate that for low-lying states, wave functionals are sensitive to global gauge copies which we will argue is equivalent to saying that they are sensitive to the geometric and topological features of configuration space.