4 research outputs found
Strong obstruction of the Berends-Burgers-van Dam spin-3 vertex
In the eighties, Berends, Burgers and van Dam (BBvD) found a nonabelian cubic
vertex for self-interacting massless fields of spin three in flat spacetime.
However, they also found that this deformation is inconsistent at higher order
for any multiplet of spin-three fields. For arbitrary symmetric gauge fields,
we severely constrain the possible nonabelian deformations of the gauge algebra
and, using these results, prove that the BBvD obstruction cannot be cured by
any means, even by introducing fields of spin higher (or lower) than three.Comment: 19 pages, no figur