English

One-loop effective actions and higher spins

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-02-01 v3

Abstract

The idea we advocate in this paper is that the one-loop effective action of a free (massive) field theory coupled to external sources (via conserved currents) contains complete information about the classical dynamics of such sources. We show many explicit examples of this fact for (scalar and fermion) free field theories in various dimensions d=3,4,5,6d=3,4,5,6 coupled to (bosonic, completely symmetric) sources with a number of spins. In some cases we also provide compact formulas for any dimension. This paper is devoted to two-point correlators, so the one-loop effective action we construct contains only the quadratic terms and the relevant equations of motion for the sources we obtain are the linearized ones.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.02088,
  title  = {One-loop effective actions and higher spins},
  author = {L. Bonora and M. Cvitan and P. Dominis Prester and S. Giaccari and B. Lima De Souza and T. Stemberga},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.02088},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

73 pages, typos corrected, section 3 rewritten, comment added in section 4, second paragraph added in section 12, Appendix C added

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:42:58.649Z