Hiding anomalies

Abstract

Anomalies can be anticipated at the classical level without changing the classical cohomology, by introducing extra degrees of freedom. In the process, the anomaly does not quite disappear. We show that, in fact, it is shifted to new symmetries that come with the extra fields.

Antibracket, antifields and gauge-theory quantization

“…(9.70) and (9.72) arẽ 77) except that, for X µ ,R X acts in a D-dimensional space, whereas H 0 acts in a twodimensional space, since −/ ∂/ ∂ = I 2 ∂ n ∂ n = I 2 (−∂ τ ∂ τ + ∂ σ ∂ σ ), where I 2 denotes the two-dimensional unit matrix. The non-zero terms in (∆S) reg in Eq.…”

“…[61,63]. Methods of quantizing anomalous gauge theories using the antibracket formalism were developed in [61,62,131,133,134,77,63].…”

“…A difficulty is the presence of an orderh term. However, in certain cases a canonical transformation which scales φˆi by 1/h 1 2 [77] can be performed to overcome the problem. The general structure for S for anomalous gauge theories with an anomalous abelian subgroup is…”

Background charges and consistent continuous deformations of 2d gravity theories

“…For a class of such models we computed in [1] (cf. also [2]) the cohomology groups H g (S) of the BRST-Slavnov operator S in the space of local functionals for all ghost numbers g. This letter is devoted to the discussion of the results for H 0 (S): we will use them to construct all so-called background charges for these models in the form described in [3] and all continuous deformations of the classical actions which are consistent in the sense that the deformed actions are invariant under possibly deformed gauge transformations [4].…”

Wess-Zumino terms for reducible anomalous gauge theories

“…Extracting the quadratic part 3 in θ α of (4.7) we can see that its kinetic term is of orderh. In order to get standard propagators we make a canonical transformation (in the antibracket sense) [16] [11] in θ α -sector: …”