Light cone gauge


In theoretical physics, light cone gauge is an approach to remove the ambiguities arising from a gauge symmetry. While the term refers to several situations, a null component of a field A is set to zero in all cases.

Gauge theory

In gauge theory, light-cone gauge refers to the condition where
It is a method to get rid of the redundancies implied by Yang–Mills symmetry.

String theory

In string theory, light-cone gauge fixes the reparameterization invariance on the world sheet by
where is a constant and is the worldsheet time.
The advantage of light-cone gauge is that all ghosts and other unphysical degrees of freedom can be eliminated. The disadvantage is that some symmetries such as Lorentz symmetry become obscured.