The effective action and quantum gauge transformations

Abstract

The local symmetry transformations of the quantum effective action for general gauge theory are found. Additional symmetries arise under consideration of background gauges. Together with "trivial" gauge transformations, vanishing on mass shell, they can be used for construction simple gauge generators. For example, for the Yang-Mills theory the classically invariant effective action is obtained, reproducing DeWitt's result. For rank one theories a natural generalization is proposed.