A consistent quantum treatment of general gauge theories with an arbitrary gauge-fixing in the presence of soft breaking of the BRST symmetry in the field–antifield formalism is developed. It is based on a gauged (involving a field-dependent parameter) version of finite BRST transformations. The prescription allows one to restore the gauge-independence of the effective action at its extremals and therefore also that of the conventional S-matrix for a theory with BRST-breaking terms being additively introduced into a BRST-invariant action in order to achieve a consistency of the functional integral. We demonstrate the applicability of this prescription within the approach of functional renormalization group to the Yang–Mills and gravity theories. The Gribov–Zwanziger action and the refined Gribov–Zwanziger action for a many-parameter family of gauges, including the Coulomb, axial and covariant gauges, are derived perturbatively on the basis of finite gauged BRST transformations starting from Landau gauge. It is proved that gauge theories with soft breaking of BRST symmetry can be made consistent if the transformed BRST-breaking terms satisfy the same soft BRST symmetry breaking condition in the resulting gauge as the untransformed ones in the initial gauge, and also without this requirement.
Quantum treatment of Verlinde’s entropic force conjecture
