Constrained Dynamics of the Coupled Abelian TwoForm.pdfVIP

LA-UR-93-474 hep-th/9302046 Constrained Dynamics of the Coupled Abelian Two-Form 3 9 9 1 b Amitabha Lahiri† e F 0 Theoretical Division T-8 1 Los Alamos National Laboratory 1 v Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA 6 4 0 2 Abstract 0 3 I present the reduction of phase space of the theory of an antisymmetric tensor po- 9 / tential coupled to an abelian gauge field, using Dirac’s procedure. Duality transformations h t- on the reduced phase space are also discussed. p e h : v i X r a 01/93 † (lahiri@pion.lanl.gov) 1. Introduction The uses of an abelian antisymmetric tensor potential is manifold. It was probably first used in the context of particle theory to describe a massless particle of zero helicity, the notoph [1,2]. It has subsequently appeared in the context of the theory of funda- mental strings [3,4] and of cosmic strings and vortices [5,6,7]. It has also been used to put a topological charge (hair) on black holes [8,9,10], and in a mechanism for generating masses for vector bosons [11,12] via a derivative coupling. The use of the word ‘abelian’ in the description means that the antisymmetric potential Bµν is invariant under gauge transformations belonging to any compact gauge group, although it does have an internal non-compact symmetry. (Nonabelian generalizations will not be discussed here.) It is also known that the free Bµν field is dynamically ‘dual’ to a scalar, quantum mechanically [13,14] as well as classically. In this letter, I apply Dirac’s procedure [15] for reduction