Exact renormalization group for gauge theories

Renormalization group ideas have been extremely important to progress in our understanding of gauge field theory. Particularly the idea of asymptotic freedom leads us to hope that nonabelian gauge theories exist in four dimensions and yet are capable of producing the physics we observe-quarks confined in meson and baryon states. For a thorough understanding of the ultraviolet behavior of gauge theories, we need to go beyond the approximation of the theory at some momentum scale by theories with one or a small number of coupling constants. In other words, we need a method of performing exact renormalization group transformations, keeping control of higher order effects, nonlocal effects, and large field effects that are usually ignored. Rigorous renormalization group methods have been described or proposed in the lectures of Gawedzki, Kupiainen, Mack, and Mitter. Earlier work of Glimm and Jaffe and Gallavotti et al. on the /phi/ model in three dimensions were quite important to later developments in this area. We present here a block spin procedure which works for gauge theories, at least in the superrenormalizable case. It should be enlightening for the reader to compare the various methods described in these proceedings-especially from the point of view of how each method is suited to the physics of the problem it is used to study