The exact decomposition of gauge variables in lattice Yang-Mills theory

In this Letter, we consider lattice versions of the decomposition of the Yang-Mills field a la Cho-Faddeev-Niemi, which was extended by Kondo, Shinohara and Murakami in the continuum formulation. For the SU(N) gauge group, we propose a set of defining equations for specifying the decomposition of the gauge link variable and solve them exactly without using the ansatz adopted in the previous studies for SU(2) and SU(3). As a result, we obtain the general form of the decomposition for SU(N) gauge link variables and confirm the previous results obtained for SU(2) and SU(3).