English

On Covariant Actions for Chiral $p-$Forms

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-12-17 v2

Abstract

We construct a Lorentz and generally covariant, polynomial action for free chiral pp-forms, classically equivalent to the Pasti-Sorokin-Tonin (PST) formulation. The minimal set up requires introducing an auxiliary pp-form on top of the physical gauge pp-form and the PST scalar. The action enjoys multiple duality symmetries, including those that exchange the roles of physical and auxiliary pp-form fields. Actions of the same type are available for duality-symmetric formulations, which is demonstrated on the example of the electromagnetic field in four dimensions. There, the degrees of freedom of a single Maxwell field are described employing four distinct vector gauge fields and a scalar field.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.01789,
  title  = {On Covariant Actions for Chiral $p-$Forms},
  author = {Karapet Mkrtchyan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.01789},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

19 pages. Published version with minor corrections

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:40:07.603Z