In this paper we put forward a systematic and unifying approach to construct gauge invariant composite fields out of connections. It relies on the existence in the theory of a group valued field with a prescribed gauge transformation. As an illustration, we detail some examples. Two of them are based on known results: the first one provides a reinterpretation of the symmetry breaking mechanism of the electroweak part of the Standard Model of particle physics; the second one is an application to Einstein's theory of gravity described as a gauge theory in terms of Cartan connections. The last example depicts a new situation: starting with a gauge field theory on Atiyah Lie algebroids, the gauge invariant composite fields describe massive vector fields. Some mathematical and physical discussions illustrate and highlight the relevance and the generality of this approach.Comment: 22 pages, revised version to appear in Int. J. of Geometric Methods in Modern Physic

To systematically answer the generalized Kretschmann objection, we propose a mean to make operational a criterion widely recognized as allowing to decide if the gauge symmetry of a theory is artificial or substantial. Our proposition is based on the dressing field method of gauge symmetry reduction, a new simple tool from mathematical physics. This general scheme allows in particular to straightforwardly argue that the notion of spontaneous symmetry breaking is superfluous to the empirical success of the electroweak theory. Important questions regarding the context of justification of the theory then arise.

Tractors and Twistors bundles both provide natural conformally covariant calculi on 4D-Riemannian manifolds. They have different origins but are closely related, and usually constructed bottom-up from prolongation of defining differential equations. We propose alternative top-down gauge theoretic constructions starting from the conformal Cartan bundle P and its vectorial E and spinorial E associated bundles. Our key ingredient is the dressing field method of gauge symmetry reduction, which allows to exhibit tractors and twistors and their associated connections as gauge fields of a non-standard kind as far as Weyl rescaling symmetry is concerned. By which we mean that they implement the gauge principle but are of a different geometric nature than the well known differential geometric objects usually underlying gauge theories. We provide the corresponding BRST treatment. The present paper deals with the case of tractors while a companion paper deals with twistors.

We take advantage of the principal bundle geometry of the space of connections to obtain general results on the presymplectic structure of two classes of (pure) gauge theories: invariant theories, and non-invariant theories satisfying two restricting hypothesis. In particular, we derive the general field-dependent gauge transformations of the presymplectic potential and presymplectic 2-form in both cases. We point-out that a generalisation of the standard bundle geometry, called twisted geometry, arises naturally in the study of non-invariant gauge theories (e.g. non-Abelian Chern-Simons theory). These results prove that the well-known problem of associating a symplectic structure to a gauge theory over bounded regions is a generic feature of both classes. The edge modes strategy, recently introduced to address this issue, has been actively developed in various contexts by several authors. We draw attention to the dressing field method as the geometric framework underpinning, or rather encompassing, this strategy. The geometric insight afforded by the method both clarifies it and clearly delineates its potential shortcomings as well as its conditions of success. Applying our general framework to various examples allows to straightforwardly recover several results of the recent literature on edge modes and on the presymplectic structure of general relativity.