English

Chiral higher-spin theories from twistor space

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-05-15 v1

Abstract

We reformulate chiral higher-spin Yang-Mills and gravity on R4\mathbb{R}^4 as 'CR-holomorphic' theories of Chern-Simons type; in the most general case, these are Moyal deformed to become non-commutative. They are defined on the space of non-projective twistors of unit length. These spaces carry S7S^7, S3×R4S^3\times \mathbb{R}^4 or AdS3+4_{3+4} metrics but are also endowed with a Cauchy-Riemann structure, an odd-dimensional analogue of a complex structure, with respect to which the theories are holomorphic. They are circle bundles over standard projective twistor spaces and the higher spin fields arise naturally as Kaluza-Klein modes. We give a perturbative analysis to identify the spectrum and three-point vertices on spacetime and, for flat space, in momentum space. These vertices can have helicities (+++)(+++), (++)(++-) or (+)(+--), but are nevertheless all of MHV\overline{\text{MHV}} type in the sense that they are supported on momenta with proportional anti-self-dual spinors. On reduction to spacetime, there are higher valence vertices but these appear to be a gauge artifact. Further generalizations are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.09419,
  title  = {Chiral higher-spin theories from twistor space},
  author = {Lionel Mason and Atul Sharma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09419},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:33:04.941Z