Three approaches to chiral form interactions

Abstract

We briefly review and critically compare three approaches to constructing Lagrangian theories of self-interacting Abelian chiral form fields with manifest Lorentz invariance. The first approach relies on the original ideas of Pasti, Sorokin, and Tonin (PST) and has been explored since the late 1990s. The second approach was introduced by Ashoke Sen in 2015. The third approach has been developed over the last few years in the works of the present authors and other collaborators and may be called the ‘clone field’ formalism since it features an auxiliary ‘clone’ of the gauge field sector. We argue that this last approach shares the attractive features of the other two while avoiding their respective shortcomings. Like in Sen's approach, within the clone field formalism, arbitrary interactions can be straightforwardly included in any number of dimensions (treating interactions becomes very difficult in the PST formalism in dimensions greater than 6). Like in the PST approach, all the auxiliary fields are gauged away on-shell (while in Sen's approach, they merely decouple from the physical fields but remain dynamical).