Abstract
Motivated by the generation of action principles from off-shell dualisation, we present a general class of free, topological theories in three dimensional Minkowski spacetime that exhibit higher-spin gauge invariance. In the spin-two case, we recover a dual reformulation of the triplet system already known, while the higher-spin systems that we obtain seem to be new. They are associated with wild quivers. We study in which situations these exotic (or strange) higher-spin models can be extended to dS3 and AdS3 backgrounds, revealing that the flat limit of such models, when they exist, admits a one-parameter freedom. Interactions are studied in the simplest higher-spin case featuring spin-2 and spin-3 fields. We then give several higher-spin generalizations of these strange systems.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Antoine Bourget for useful discussions on quiver representations. We would also like to thank Gaston Giribet, Stam Nicolis and Massimo Porrati for discussions.
AC and ES are research associates of the Fund for Scientific Research — FNRS, Belgium. This work was partially supported by the FNRS through the grants No. FC.36447, No. F.4503.20, and No. T.0022.19. The work of ES was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101002551). The work of VL was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101034383.
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Boulanger, N., Campoleoni, A., Lekeu, V. et al. Strange higher-spin topological systems in 3D. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 109 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2024)109
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2024)109