The mutual compatibility of the dynamical equations and constraints describing a massive particle of arbitrary spin, though essential for consistency, is generically lost in the presence of interactions. The conventional Lagrangian approach avoids this difficulty, but fails to ensure light-cone propagation and becomes very cumbersome. In this paper, we take an alternative route−the involutive form of the equations and constraints−to guarantee their algebraic consistency. This approach enormously simplifies the search for consistent interactions, now seen as deformations of the involutive system, by keeping manifest the causal propagation of the correct number of degrees of freedom. We consider massive particles of arbitrary integer spin in electromagnetic and gravitational backgrounds to find their possible non-minimal local couplings. Apart from easily reproducing some well-known results, we find restrictions on the backgrounds for consistent propagation of such a particle in isolation. The results can be altered by non-local interactions that may arise from additional massive states in the interacting theory.

We provide a unified treatment of electric-magnetic duality, at the action level and with manifest Lorentz invariance, for massive, massless as well as partially-massless gravitons propagating in maximally symmetric spacetimes of any dimension n > 3 . For massive and massless fields, we complete previous analyses that use parent-action techniques by giving dual descriptions that enable direct counting of physical degrees of freedom in the flat and massless limit. The same treatment is extended to the partiallymassless case, where the duality has been previously discussed in covariant form only at the level of the equations of motion. The nature of the dual graviton is therefore clarified for all values of the mass and of the cosmological constant.

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We study the relation between a given set of equations of motion in configuration space and a Poisson bracket. A Poisson structure is consistent with the equations of motion if the symplectic form satisfy some consistency conditions. When the symplectic structure is commutative these conditions are the Helmholtz integrability equations for the nonrestricted inverse problem of the calculus of variations [8]. We have found the corresponding consistency conditions for the symplectic noncommutative case.