Stability and consistent interactions in Podolsky's generalized electrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper confirms the stability of Podolsky's generalized electrodynamics, constructs conserved quantities, evaluates transition amplitudes, and explores consistent non-Abelian interactions without changing the physical degrees of freedom.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of stability, gauge fixing, and consistent interactions in Podolsky's higher derivative electrodynamics, including non-Abelian extensions.

Findings

Confirmed stability via conserved quantities

Derived generalized radiation gauge condition

Found non-Abelian extensions do not alter degrees of freedom

Abstract

We confirm the stability of Podolsky's generalized electrodynamics by constructing a series of two-parametric bounded conserved quantities which includes the canonical energy-momentum tensors. In addition, we evaluate the transition-amplitude of this higher derivative system in BV antifield formalism and obtain the desirable generalized radiation gauge condition by choosing appropriate gauge-fixing fermion. Within the framework of Lagrangian BRST cohomology, we present the constructions of consistent interactions in Podolsky's model and when concentrating on the antighost number zero part of the master action after deformation process, we get the non-Abelian extensions of the Podolsky's theory. Furthermore, we calculate the number of physical degrees of freedom in the resulting higher derivative system utilizing Dirac-Bergmann algorithm method and show that it is unchanged if the consistent interactions are included into the free theory.