COUPLING CHIRAL BOSONS TO GRAVITY

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how the covariant MWY representation of chiral bosons can be coupled to background gravity, establishing its equivalence with the FJ formulation and clarifying their relationship.

Contribution

It shows the explicit coupling of the covariant MWY chiral boson to gravity, connecting it with the FJ approach and highlighting their equivalence.

Findings

MWY representation is covariant and gauge-invariant.

Coupling to gravity is explicitly constructed.

Equivalence between MWY and FJ formulations is confirmed.

Abstract

The chiral boson actions of Floreanini and Jackiw (FJ), and of McClain,Wu and Yu (MWY) have been recently shown to be different representations of the same chiral boson theory. MWY displays manifest covariance and also a (gauge) symmetry that is hidden in the FJ side, which, on the other hand, displays the physical spectrum in a simple manner. We make use of the covariance of the MWY representation for the chiral boson to couple it to background gravity showing explicitly the equivalence with the previous results for the FJ representation