Superfield approach to nilpotent symmetries in 3D Jackiw–Pi model of massive non-Abelian theory

Abstract

In the available literature, only the Becchi–Rouet–Stora–Tyutin (BRST) symmetries are known for the Jackiw–Pi model of the three (2 + 1)-dimensional (3D) massive non-Abelian gauge theory. We derive the off-shell nilpotent [Formula: see text] and absolutely anticommuting (sbsab + sabsb = 0) (anti-)BRST transformations s(a)b corresponding to the usual Yang–Mills gauge transformations of this model by exploiting the “augmented” superfield formalism where the horizontality condition and gauge invariant restrictions blend together in a meaningful manner. There is a non-Yang–Mills (NYM) symmetry in this theory, too. However, we do not touch the NYM symmetry in our present endeavor. This superfield formalism leads to the derivation of an (anti-)BRST invariant Curci–Ferrari restriction, which plays a key role in the proof of absolute anticommutativity of s(a)b. The derivation of the proper anti-BRST symmetry transformations is important from the point of view of geometrical objects called gerbes. A novel feature of our present investigation is the derivation of the (anti-)BRST transformations for the auxiliary field ρ from our superfield formalism, which is neither generated by the (anti-)BRST charges nor obtained from the requirements of nilpotency and (or) absolute anticommutativity of the (anti-)BRST symmetries for our present 3D non-Abelian 1-form gauge theory.