A remark on the gauging of chiral bosons

TL;DR

This paper examines the gauging of chiral bosons, revealing that only specific coupling schemes are consistent, challenging previous assumptions in the literature.

Contribution

It demonstrates that naive gauging procedures are incompatible with covariant chiral constraints, identifying the only consistent coupling for left chiral scalars.

Findings

Naive gauging leaves covariant constraints incompatible with field equations.

Only coupling with left chiral currents is consistent for left chiral scalars.

Challenges existing literature on gauging schemes for chiral bosons.

Abstract

We study the interacting chiral boson and observe that a naive gauging procedure leaves the covariant chiral constraint incompatible with the field equations. Consistency, therefore, rules out most gauging schemes: in a left chiral scalar, only the coupling with the left chiral currents leads to consistent results, in discordance with current literature.