Consistent chiral bosonization with abelian and non-abelian gauge symmetries

Abstract

An O( N) non-abelian generalization of Siegel's action for chiral bosons coupled to gauge fields is presented. We show that the only consistent gauging of the O( N) symmetry corresponds to that of N free Majorana-Weyl fermions. The equivalence between the quantized O( N) chiral model without gauge fields and the free fermion theory is then established. The theory is treated as a constrained hamiltonian system in which zero-modes are carefully taken into account. Specializing to the gauged abelian case, the solution to the chiral Schwinger model is discussed in the framework of chiral bosonization.