Equivalence classes of theories
Many physical theories have BRST-like structure. This means that there is a nilpotent fermionic
symmetry , and the space of physical states is the cohomology of .
Such theories come with an equivalence relation. Physically, the theory with the action
is equivalent to the theory with the action for any operator . Physically
meaningful quantities should be invariant, i.e. should not change under this
equivalence transformation. Important question is:
how can we obtain such invariants?
Naively it would seem that the only way to obtain an invariant is to take the path integral:
where are some BRST-closed operators.
But actually there are other possibilities, which we will now describe.