Chiral Boson Theory on the Light-Front

The {\it front form} framework for describing the quantized theory of chiral boson is discussed. It avoids the conflict with the requirement of the principle of microcausality as is found in the conventional equal- time treatment. The discussion of the Floreanini-Jackiw model and its modified version for describing the chiral boson becomes very transparent on the light-front.Comment: 9 pages, plain Late

Perspectives of Light-Front Quantized Field Theory: Some New Results

Some basic topics in the light-front (LF) quantization of relativistic field theory are reviewed. It is argued that the LF quantization is equally appropriate as the conventional one and that they lead, assuming the micro- causality principle, to the same physical content. This is confirmed in the studies on the LF of the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB), of the degenerate vacua in Schwinger model (SM) and Chiral SM (CSM), of the chiral boson theory, and of the QCD in covariant gauges among others. The discussion on the LF is more economical and more transparent. In the context of the Dyson-Wick pertur- bation theory the relevant popagators in the front form theory are causal. The Wick rotation can then be performed to employ the Euclidean space integrals in momentum space. The lack of manifest covariance becomes tractable, and still more so if we employ, as discussed in the text, the Fourier transform of the fermionic field based on a special construction of the LF spinor. The fact that the hyperplanes $x^{pm}=0$ constitute characteristic surfaces of the hyper- bolic partial differential equation is found irrelevant in the quantized theory.Comment: 50 pages, plain Latex, Invited article for "Saga of Field Theory: From Points to Strings", Eds., A.N. Mitra et al., Indian National Science Academy-INSA, Indi