Twisted self-duality for higher spin gauge fields and prepotentials

TL;DR

This paper reformulates free higher spin gauge field equations as twisted self-duality conditions involving curvatures and introduces prepotentials with conformal and diffeomorphism invariance, revealing an off-shell electric-magnetic symmetry in four dimensions.

Contribution

It presents a new formulation of higher spin equations as twisted self-duality conditions and introduces prepotentials with conformal and diffeomorphism invariance, extending previous spin 2 and 3 results.

Findings

Twisted self-duality conditions involve only first-order time derivatives.

Prepotentials possess higher spin conformal and diffeomorphism invariance.

The formulation exhibits an off-shell SO(2) electric-magnetic symmetry in four dimensions.

Abstract

We show that the equations of motion for (free) integer higher spin gauge fields can be formulated as twisted self-duality conditions on the higher spin curvatures of the spin-$s$ field and its dual. We focus on the case of four spacetime dimensions, but formulate our results in a manner applicable to higher spacetime dimensions. The twisted self-duality conditions are redundant and we exhibit a non-redundant subset of conditions, which have the remarkable property to involve only first-order derivatives with respect to time. This non-redundant subset equates the electric field of the spin-$s$ field (which we define) to the magnetic field of its dual (which we also define), and vice versa. The non-redundant subset of twisted self-duality conditions involve the purely spatial components of the spin-$s$ field and its dual, and also the components of the fields with one zero index. One can get rid of these gauge components by taking the curl of the equations, which does not change their physical content. In this form, the twisted self-duality conditions can be derived from a variational principle that involves prepotentials, which are the higher spin generalizations of the prepotentials previously found in the spins 2 and 3 cases. The prepotentials have again the intriguing feature of possessing both higher spin diffeomorphism invariance and higher spin conformal geometry. The tools introduced in an earlier paper for handling higher spin conformal geometry turn out to be crucial for streamlining the analysis. In four spacetime dimensions where the electric and magnetic fields are tensor fields of the same type, the twisted self-duality conditions enjoy an $SO(2)$ electric-magnetic invariance. We explicitly show that this symmetry is an "off-shell symmetry" (i.e., a symmetry of the action and not just of the equations of motion). Remarks on the extension to higher dimensions are given.