Residual gauge fixing in light-front QCD

Understanding the nontrivial features of light-front QCD is a central goal in current investigations of nonperturbative light-front field theory. We find that, with the choice of light-front gauge with antisymmetric boundary conditions for the field variables, the residual gauge freedom is fixed and the light-front QCD vacuum is trivial. The nontrivial structure in light-front QCD is determined by non-vanishing asymptotic physical (transverse) gauge fields at longitudinal infinity, which are responsible for nonzero topological winding number.