Massless spinning fields on the Light-Front: quartic vertices and amplitudes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure of massless higher-spin fields on the light-front, constructing quartic vertices and amplitudes, and proposing new local higher-spin theories consistent with flat space locality and Poincare symmetry.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic construction of quartic vertices for higher-spin fields on the light-front, including solutions with higher-derivative interactions and new local higher-spin theories.

Findings

Constructed lower-derivative, lower-spin quartic vertices.

Found solutions with higher-derivative cubic vertices.

Proposed a local higher-spin theory in flat space.

Abstract

Within the light-front approach in flat space, we study the closure of the Poincare algebra at the quartic order, specifically the nonholomorphic constraint involving both MHV and anti-MHV vertices. We first recover some well-established results: the existence of Yang-Mills theory and gravity, as well as the inconsistency of interacting multi-graviton theories. We explicitly construct several lower-derivative and lower-spin quartic vertices. We then turn to theories involving massless higher-spin fields. It becomes evident that the quartic constraint does not allow many cubic interactions to survive, in accordance with the well-known no-go results. Nevertheless, once higher-derivative cubic vertices are included, we find nontrivial solutions to the full quartic constraint and determine the corresponding quartic vertices. On this basis, we conjecture the complete set of quartic vertices that solve the light-cone consistency conditions. Exploiting this, we find all allowed unitary local higher-spin theories and identify new families of local quasi-chiral higher-spin theories. We then determine all local higher-spin four-point amplitudes using the spinor-helicity formalism together with locality. We conclude with a short discussion on non-locality and propose a ``local'' (at the amplitude level) higher-spin theory in flat space.