Thursday, June 7, 2012

1206.1048 (Gustavo Lucena Gomez et al.)

Higher-Spin Fermionic Gauge Fields and Their Electromagnetic Coupling    [PDF]

Gustavo Lucena Gomez, Marc Henneaux, Rakibur Rahman
We study the electromagnetic coupling of massless higher-spin fermions in flat space. Under the assumptions of locality and Poincare invariance, we employ the BRST-BV cohomological methods to construct consistent parity-preserving off-shell cubic 1-s-s vertices. Consistency and non-triviality of the deformations not only rule out minimal coupling, but also restrict the possible number of derivatives. Our findings are in complete agreement with, but derived in a manner independent from, the light-cone-formulation results of Metsaev and the string-theory-inspired results of Sagnotti-Taronna. We prove that any gauge-algebra-preserving vertex cannot deform the gauge transformations. We also show that in a local theory, without additional dynamical higher-spin gauge fields, the non-abelian vertices are eliminated by the lack of consistent second-order deformations.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.1048

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