Unifying approaches to chiral bosons

Abstract

Chiral bosons, or self-dual $p$-form fields, are ubiquitous in string theoretic contexts but are challenging to treat. Lagrangian constructions invariably introduce a complexity be it auxiliary fields or sacrificing Lorentz invariance. In this paper we show how to pass between such different approaches to chiral bosons starting from a Chern Simons point of view to recover formulations of Pasti, Sorokin and Tonin and of Mkrtchyan. This leads to a novel generalization of the latter to include non-Abelian chiral bosons in 2-dimensions, and generalizations to include twisted self-duality which are relevant in T-duality symmetric approaches to string theory. Our approach also shows how global affine symmetries of two- and higher-dimensional chiral bosons emerge from broken Chern-Simons gauge transformations on the boundary.

Topics & Concepts