QUANTIZATION OF DYNAMIC-SYSTEMS WITH CHERN-SIMONS TERMS

We propose a novel approach to the quantization of Chern-Simons theories in the Hamiltonian framework that is manifestly gauge invariant and does not require gauge fixing. This approach is based on the observation that there is a simple gauge-invariant manner to remove the constraints and to identify the physical degrees of freedom. We first illustrate the method in the classical theory and then proceed to implement it at the quantum level. The main advantage of this scheme is that it allows the study of Chern-Simons theories by isolating the physical degrees of freedom from the start of the quantization procedure. In particular this method allows us to find a local, gauge-invariant order parameter to study aspects of broken symmetries.