Unifying Approaches to Chiral Bosons

Abstract

Chiral bosons, or self-dual p-form fields, are ubiquitous in string theoretic contexts but are challenging to treat. Lagrangian constructions invariably introduce a complexity be it auxiliary fields or sacrificing Lorentz invariance. In this note we show how to pass between such different approaches to chiral bosons starting from a Chern Simons point of view to recover formulations of Pasti, Sorokin and Tonin and of Mkrtchyan. This leads to a novel generalisation of the latter to include non-Abelian chiral bosons in 2-dimensions, and generalisations to include twisted self-duality which are relevant in T-duality symmetric approaches to string theory. Our approach also shows how global affine symmetries of two- and higher-dimensional chiral bosons emerge from broken Chern-Simons gauge transformations on the boundary.

arXiv comment23 pages. Minor updates, matches published version

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Interacting Chiral Form Field Theories and $T\overline{T}$-like Flows in Six and Higher Dimensions
• Integrable degenerate $\mathcal{E}$-models from 4d Chern-Simons theory
• Democracy from topology
• Flows in the Space of Interacting Chiral Boson Theories