The right-hand side of the Jacobi identity: to be naught or not to be ?

Abstract

The geometric approach to iterated variations of local functionals -e.g., of the (master-)action functional - resulted in an extension of the deformation quantisation technique to the set-up of Poisson models of field theory. It also allowed of a rigorous proof for the main inter-relations between the Batalin-Vilkovisky (BV) Laplacian Δ and variational Schouten bracket [,]. The ad hoc use of these relations had been a known analytic difficulty in the BV- formalism for quantisation of gauge systems; now achieved, the proof does actually not require the assumption of graded-commutativity. Explained in our previous work, geometry's self- regularisation is rendered by Gel'fand's calculus of singular linear integral operators supported on the diagonal.We now illustrate that analytic technique by inspecting the validity mechanism for the graded Jacobi identity which the variational Schouten bracket does satisfy (whence Δ2 = 0, i.e., the BV-Laplacian is a differential acting in the algebra of local functionals). By using one tuple of three variational multi-vectors twice, we contrast the new logic of iterated variations - when the right-hand side of Jacobi's identity vanishes altogether - with the old method: interlacing its steps and stops, it could produce some non-zero representative of the trivial class in the top- degree horizontal cohomology. But we then show at once by an elementary counterexample why, in the frames of the old approach that did not rely on Gel'fand's calculus, the BV-Laplacian failed to be a graded derivation of the variational Schouten bracket.