Gauge Theory and Chemical Structure

A bstract : The possibility of chemical structure in the context of quantized matter is examined by way of Richard Bader's Atoms in Molecules . I critically examine his notion of ‘electronic charge density’—showing that he cannot really mean ‘density of charge’—and I argue that the appropriate concept is expectation value of charge. This still allows him to define chemical structure, but it makes problematic his appeals to the explanatory power of structure. This is because, as Rosenfeld and Bohr showed, the expectation value of charge cannot be taken as the electronic field experienced by other charges. I suggest that we can recover the efficacy of structure by thinking of chemistry as a gauge theory. Current consensus in the study of gauge theories indicates that gauge potentials represent a new type of property; while no member of the family of functions comprising the gauge potential is real, the potential itself is causally potent. I illustrate this in the case of electrodynamics, where the vector potential can causally influence charges in the absence of electric or magnetic fields. I show how chemical structure can be considered to be a gauge field. Following Bader, I take it to be a family of geometric configurations, no one of which is possessed by a given molecule. I claim that current research in gauge theory licenses the attribution of causal potency to this notion of structure, despite its lack of reality. I thus begin the process of freeing the explanatory resources of gauge theory from physics alone.