Unified BRST approach to (partially) massless and massive AdS fields of arbitrary symmetry type

Abstract

We construct a concise gauge invariant formulation for massless, partially massless, and massive bosonic AdS fields of arbitrary symmetry type at the level of equations of motion. Our formulation admits two equivalent descriptions: in terms of the ambient space and in terms of an appropriate vector bundle, as an explicitly local first-order BRST formalism. The second version is a parent-like formulation that can be used to generate various other formulations via equivalent reductions. In particular, we demonstrate a relation to the unfolded description of massless and partially massless fields.Comment: 30 pages; v2: Journal version. Comments, conclusions and refs added, typos remove