8,087 research outputs found
Null Surfaces and Legendre Submanifolds
It is shown that the main variable Z of the Null Surface Formulation of GR is
the generating function of a constrained Lagrange submanifold that lives on the
energy surface H=0 and that its level surfaces Z=const. are Legendre
submanifolds on that energy surface.
The behaviour of the variable Z at the caustic points is analysed and a
genralization of this variable is discussed.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure
BRST theory without Hamiltonian and Lagrangian
We consider a generic gauge system, whose physical degrees of freedom are
obtained by restriction on a constraint surface followed by factorization with
respect to the action of gauge transformations; in so doing, no Hamiltonian
structure or action principle is supposed to exist. For such a generic gauge
system we construct a consistent BRST formulation, which includes the
conventional BV Lagrangian and BFV Hamiltonian schemes as particular cases. If
the original manifold carries a weak Poisson structure (a bivector field giving
rise to a Poisson bracket on the space of physical observables) the generic
gauge system is shown to admit deformation quantization by means of the
Kontsevich formality theorem. A sigma-model interpretation of this quantization
algorithm is briefly discussed.Comment: 19 pages, minor correction
Formal Higher-Spin Theories and Kontsevich-Shoikhet-Tsygan Formality
The formal algebraic structures that govern higher-spin theories within the
unfolded approach turn out to be related to an extension of the Kontsevich
Formality, namely, the Shoikhet-Tsygan Formality. Effectively, this allows one
to construct the Hochschild cocycles of higher-spin algebras that make the
interaction vertices. As an application of these results we construct a family
of Vasiliev-like equations that generate the Hochschild cocycles with
symmetry from the corresponding cycles. A particular case of may be
relevant for the on-shell action of the theory. We also give the exact
equations that describe propagation of higher-spin fields on a background of
their own. The consistency of formal higher-spin theories turns out to have a
purely geometric interpretation: there exists a certain symplectic invariant
associated to cutting a polytope into simplices, namely, the Alexander-Spanier
cocycle.Comment: typos fixed, many comments added, 36 pages + 20 pages of Appendices,
3 figure
A minimal BV action for Vasiliev's four-dimensional higher spin gravity
The action principle for Vasiliev's four-dimensional higher-spin gravity
proposed recently by two of the authors, is converted into a minimal BV master
action using the AKSZ procedure, which amounts to replacing the classical
differential forms by vectorial superfields of fixed total degree given by the
sum of form degree and ghost number. The nilpotency of the BRST operator is
achieved by imposing boundary conditions and choosing appropriate gauge
transitions between charts leading to a globally-defined formulation based on a
principal bundle.Comment: 39 pages, 1 figure. Additional comments in the conclusion
Aspects of Bifurcation Theory for Piecewise-Smooth, Continuous Systems
Systems that are not smooth can undergo bifurcations that are forbidden in
smooth systems. We review some of the phenomena that can occur for
piecewise-smooth, continuous maps and flows when a fixed point or an
equilibrium collides with a surface on which the system is not smooth. Much of
our understanding of these cases relies on a reduction to piecewise linearity
near the border-collision. We also review a number of codimension-two
bifurcations in which nonlinearity is important.Comment: pdfLaTeX, 9 figure
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