A gauge invariant regulator for the ERG

A gauge invariant regularisation for dealing with pure Yang-Mills theories within the exact renormalization group approach is proposed. It is based on the regularisation via covariant higher derivatives and includes auxiliary Pauli-Villars fields which amounts to a spontaneously broken SU(N|N) super-gauge theory. We demonstrate perturbatively that the extended theory is ultra-violet finite in four dimensions and argue that it has a sensible limit when the regularization cutoff is removed.