BRST approach to Lagrangian formulation of bosonic totally antisymmeric tensor fields in curved space

TL;DR

This paper extends the BRST method to construct gauge-invariant Lagrangians for antisymmetric tensor fields in curved space, revealing richer gauge symmetries and auxiliary fields, demonstrating the approach's universality.

Contribution

It develops a BRST-based Lagrangian formulation for antisymmetric tensor fields in curved space, including massive and massless cases, with increased gauge symmetry and auxiliary fields.

Findings

Lagrangians include auxiliary fields and richer gauge symmetries

The reducibility order increases with the rank of the antisymmetric field

The approach demonstrates universality across different field models

Abstract

We apply the BRST approach, previously developed for higher spin field theories, to gauge invariant Lagrangian construction for antisymmetric massive and massless bosonic fields in arbitrary d-dimensional curved space. The obtained theories are reducible gauge models both in massless and massive cases and the order of reducibility grows with the value of the rank of the antisymmetric field. In both the cases the Lagrangians contain the sets of auxiliary fields and possess more rich gauge symmetry in comparison with standard Lagrangian formulation for the antisymmetric fields. This serves additional demonstration of universality of the BRST approach for Lagrangian constructions in various field models.