English

Classifying Galileon $p$-form theories

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-09-06 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We provide a complete classification of all abelian gauge invariant pp-form theories with equations of motion depending only on the second derivative of the field---the pp-form analogues of the Galileon scalar field theory. We construct explicitly the nontrivial actions that exist for spacetime dimension D11D\leq11, but our methods are general enough and can be extended to arbitrary DD. We uncover in particular a new 44-form Galileon cubic theory in D8D\geq8 dimensions. As a by-product we give a simple proof of the fact that the equations of motion depend on the pp-form gauge fields only through their field strengths, and show this explicitly for the recently discovered 33-form Galileon quartic theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.02980,
  title  = {Classifying Galileon $p$-form theories},
  author = {Cédric Deffayet and Sebastian Garcia-Saenz and Shinji Mukohyama and Vishagan Sivanesan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.02980},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

17 pages; v2: references added

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:13:12.122Z