Higher-spin self-dual Yang-Mills and gravity from the twistor space

Abstract

We lift the recently proposed theories of higher-spin self-dual Yang-Mills (SDYM) and gravity (SDGR) to the twistor space. We find that the most natural room for their twistor formulation is not in the projective, but in the full twistor space, which is the total space of the spinor bundle over the 4-dimensional manifold. In the case of higher-spin extension of the SDYM we prove an analogue of the Ward theorem, and show that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the solutions of the field equations and holomorphic vector bundles over the twistor space. In the case of the higher-spin extension of SDGR we show show that there is a one-to-one correspondence between solutions of the field equations and Ehresmann connections on the twistor space whose horizontal distributions are Poisson, and whose curvature is decomposable. These data then define an almost complex structure on the twistor space that is integrable.