English

Three-dimensional conformal geometry and prepotentials for four-dimensional fermionic higher-spin fields

High Energy Physics - Theory 2018-12-05 v2

Abstract

We introduce prepotentials for fermionic higher-spin gauge fields in four spacetime dimensions, generalizing earlier work on bosonic fields. To that end, we first develop tools for handling conformal fermionic higher-spin gauge fields in three dimensions. This is necessary because the prepotentials turn out to be three-dimensional fields that enjoy both "higher-spin diffeomorphism" and "higher-spin Weyl" gauge symmetries. We discuss a number of the key properties of the relevant Cotton tensors. The reformulation of the equations of motion as "twisted self-duality conditions" is then exhibited. We show next how the Hamiltonian constraints can be explicitly solved in terms of appropriate prepotentials and show that the action takes then the same remarkable form for all spins.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.04457,
  title  = {Three-dimensional conformal geometry and prepotentials for four-dimensional fermionic higher-spin fields},
  author = {Marc Henneaux and Victor Lekeu and Amaury Leonard and Javier Matulich and Stefan Prohazka},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04457},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

25+6 pages, 1 table, v2: 1 reference added

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:34:39.837Z