General cubic interacting vertex for massless integer higher spin fields

Abstract

We consider a massless higher spin field theory within the BRST approach and construct a general off-shell cubic vertex corresponding to irreducible higher spin fields of helicities s1,s2,s3. Unlike the previous works on cubic vertices, which do not take into account of the trace constraints, we use the complete BRST operator, including the trace constraints that describe an irreducible representation with definite integer helicity. As a result, we generalize the cubic vertex found in [14] and calculate the new contributions to the vertex, which contain additional terms with a smaller number space-time derivatives of the fields as well as the terms without derivatives.

Topics & Concepts