BF Topological Theories and Infinitely Reducible Systems

We present a rigurous disscusion for abelian $BF$ theories in which the base manifold of the $U(1)$ bundle is homeomorphic to a Hilbert space. The theory has an infinte number of stages of reducibility. We specify conditions on the base manifold under which the covarinat quantization of the system can be performed unambiguously. Applications of the formulation to the superparticle and the supertstring are also discussed.Comment: 10 pages, Late

Master Canonical Action and BRST Charge of the M Theory Bosonic Five Brane

A complete analysis of the canonical structure for a gauge fixed PST bosonic five brane action is performed. This canonical formulation is quadratic in the dependence on the antisymmetric field and it has second class constraints. We remove the second class constraints and a master canonical action with only first class constraints is proposed. The nilpotent BRST charge and its BRST invariant effective theory is constructed. The construction does not assume the existence of the inverse of the induced metric. Singular configurations are then physical ones. We obtain the physical Hamiltonian of the theory and analyze its stability properties. Finally, by studying the algebra of diffeomorphisms we find under mild assumptions the general structure for the Hamiltonian constraint for theories invariant under 6 dimensional diffeomorphisms and we give an algebraic characterization of the constraint associated with the bosonic five brane action. We also identify the constraint for the bosonic five brane action upgraded with a cosmological term, it contains a Born-Infeld type term.Comment: 33 pages, LaTeX, typos corrected, references adde

BRST QUANTIZATION OF NON-ABELIAN BF TOPOLOGICAL THEORIES

The off-shell nilpotent BRST charge and the BRST invariant effective action for non-abelian BF topological theories over D-dimensional manifolds are explicitly constructed. These theories have the feature of being reducible with exactly D-3 stages of reducibility. The adequate extended phase space including the different levels of ghosts for ghosts is explicitly obtained. Using the structure of the resulting BRST charge we show that for topological BF theories the semi-classical approximation completely describes the quantum theory. The independence of the partition function on the metric also follows from our explicit construction in a straightforward way.Comment: 13 pages, amste

A New Action Principle for Witten's Topological Field Theory

In this letter a new gauge invariant, metric independent action is introduced from which Witten's Topological Quantum Field Theory may be obtained after gauge fixing using standard BRST techniques. In our model the BRST algebra of transformations, under which the effective action is invariant, close off-shell in distintion with what occurs in the one proposed by Labastida and Pernici. Our approach provides the geometrical principle for the quantum theory. We also compare our results with an alternative formulation presented by Baulieu and Singer.Comment: 8 pages, SB/F-94-22