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Effective action for higher spin fields on (A)dS backgrounds

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Abstract

We study the one loop effective action for a class of higher spin fields by using a first-quantized description. The latter is obtained by considering spinning particles, characterized by an extended local supersymmetry on the worldline, that can propagate consistently on conformally flat spaces. The gauge fixing procedure for calculating the worldline path integral on a loop is delicate, as the gauge algebra contains nontrivial structure functions. Restricting the analysis on (A)dS backgrounds simplifies the gauge fixing procedure, and allows us to produce a useful representation of the one loop effective action. In particular, we extract the first few heat kernel coefficients for arbitrary even spacetime dimension D and for spin S identified by a curvature tensor with the symmetries of a rectangular Young tableau of D/2 rows and [S] columns.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Bologna and INFN, Sezione di Bologna, via Irnerio 46, I-40126, Bologna, Italy

    Fiorenzo Bastianelli & Roberto Bonezzi

  2. Centro de Estudios en Física y Matemáticas Basicas y Aplicadas, Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, 29050, Mexico

    Olindo Corradini

  3. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via Campi 213/A, I-41125, Modena, Italy

    Olindo Corradini

  4. Institut für Mathematik, Universität Zürich-Irchel, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057, Zürich, Switzerland

    Emanuele Latini

  5. INFN, Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, CP 13, I-00044, Frascati, Italy

    Emanuele Latini

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  1. Fiorenzo Bastianelli
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  2. Roberto Bonezzi
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  3. Olindo Corradini
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  4. Emanuele Latini
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Correspondence to Olindo Corradini.

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ArXiv ePrint: 1210.4649

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Bastianelli, F., Bonezzi, R., Corradini, O. et al. Effective action for higher spin fields on (A)dS backgrounds. J. High Energ. Phys. 2012, 113 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2012)113

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