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

• Published in: The journal of high energy physics Vol. 2012; no. 12
• Main Authors: Bastianelli, Fiorenzo, Bonezzi, Roberto, Corradini, Olindo, Latini, Emanuele
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer-Verlag 01-12-2012; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Classical and Quantum Gravitation; Elementary Particles; Fixing; High energy physics; Integrals; Mathematical analysis; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Quantum Field Theories; Quantum Field Theory; Quantum Physics; Relativity Theory; Spacetime; String Theory; Supersymmetry; Symmetry; Tensors; Field Theories in Higher Dimensions; Sigma Models; Extended Supersymmetry
• ISSN: 1029-8479; 1029-8479
• DOI: 10.1007/JHEP12(2012)113

A
bstract
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.