Higher spin fields from a worldline perspective

Jan, 2007
21 pages
Published in:
  • JHEP 02 (2007) 072
e-Print:

Citations per year

2006201120162021202402468
Abstract:
Higher spin fields in four dimensions, and more generally conformal fields in arbitrary dimensions, can be described by spinning particle models with a gauged SO(N) extended supergravity on the worldline. We consider here the one-loop quantization of these models by studying the corresponding partition function on the one-dimensional torus. After gauge fixing the supergravity multiplet, the partition function reduces to an integral over the corresponding moduli space which is computed using orthogonal polynomial techniques. We obtain a compact formula which gives the number of physical degrees of freedom for all N in all dimensions. As an aside we compute the physical degrees of freedom of the SO(4) = SU(2)xSU(2) model with only a SU(2) factor gauged, which has attracted some interest in the literature.
  • Supergravity models
  • Gauge symmetry
  • Sigma models
  • supergravity
  • spin: high
  • symmetry: O(N)
  • space-time
  • invariance: gauge
  • quantization