BATALIN-VILKOVISKY ANALYSIS FOR COVARIANT AND NONCOVARIANT ACTIONS

The equivalence between the covariant and the noncovariant versions of a constrained system is shown to hold after quantization in the frame work of the field-antifield formalism. Our study covers the cases of e lectromagnetism and Yang-Mills fields and sheds light on some aspects of the Faddeev-Popov method, for both the covariant and noncovariant a pproaches, which have not been fully clarified in the literature.