We construct an off-shell extension of cubic interaction vertices between massless bosonic Higher Spin fields on a flat background which can be obtained from perturbative bosonic string theory. We demonstrate how to construct higher quartic interaction vertices using a simple particular example. We examine whether BCFW recursion relations for interacting Higher Spin theories are applicable. We argue that for several interesting examples such relations should exist, but consistency of the theories might require that we supplement Higher Spin field theories with extended and possibly non-local objects.
We present an unfolded off-shell formulation for free massless higher-spin fields in 4d Minkowski space in terms of spinorial variables. This system arises from the on-shell one by the addition of external higher-spin currents, for which we find an unfolded description. Also we show that this off-shell system can be interpreted as Schwinger-Dyson equations and restore two-point functions of higher-spin fields this way.
The sum over planar multi-loop diagrams in the NS+ sector of type 0 open strings in flat spacetime has been proposed by Thorn as a candidate to resolve non-perturbative issues of gauge theories in the large $N$ limit. With $SU (N)$ Chan-Paton factors, the sum over planar open string multi-loop diagrams describes the t Hooft limit $Nto infty$ with $Ng_s^2$ held fixed. By including only planar diagrams in the sum the usual mechanism for the cancellation of loop divergences (which occurs, for example, among the planar and Mobius strip diagrams by choosing a specific gauge group) is not available and a renormalization procedure is needed. In this article the renormalization is achieved by suspending total momentum conservation by an amount $pequiv sum_i^n k_i eq 0$ at the level of the integrands in the integrals over the moduli and analytically continuing them to $p=0$ at the very end. This procedure has been successfully tested for the 2 and 3 gluon planar loop amplitudes by Thorn. Gauge invariance is respected and the correct running of the coupling in the limiting gauge field theory was also correctly obtained. In this article we extend those results in two directions. First, we generalize the renormalization method to an arbitrary $n$-gluon planar loop amplitude giving full details for the 4-point case. One of our main results is to provide a fully renormalized amplitude which is free of both UV and the usual spurious divergences leaving only the physical singularities in it. Second, using the complete renormalized amplitude, we extract the high-energy scattering regime at fixed angle (tensionless limit). Apart from obtaining the usual exponential falloff at high energies, we compute the full dependence on the scattering angle which shows the existence of a smooth connection between the Regge and hard scattering regimes.
We discuss the problem of consistent description of higher spin massive fields coupled to external gravity. As an example we consider massive field of spin 2 in arbitrary gravitational field. Consistency requires the theory to have the same number of degrees of freedom as in flat spacetime and to describe causal propagation. By careful analysis of lagrangian structure of the theory and its constraints we show that there exist at least two possibilities of achieving consistency. The first possibility is provided by a lagrangian on specific manifolds such as static or Einstein spacetimes. The second possibility is realized in arbitrary curved spacetime by a lagrangian representing an infinite series in curvature. In the framework of string theory we derive equations of motion for background massive spin 2 field coupled to gravity from the requirement of quantum Weyl invariance. These equations appear to be a particular case of the general consistent equations obtained from the field theory point of view.
We analyze the off-shell scattering amplitudes in the framework of the light-front perturbation theory. It is shown that the previously derived recursion relation between tree level off-shell amplitudes in this formalism actually resums whole classes of graphs into a Wilson line. More precisely, we establish a correspondence between the light-front methods for the computation of the off-shell amplitudes and the approach which makes use of the matrix elements of straight infinite Wilson lines, which are manifestly gauge invariant objects. Furthermore, since it is needed to explicitly verify the gauge invariance of light-front amplitudes, it is demonstrated that the Ward identities in this framework need additional instantaneous terms in the light-front graphs.
We formulate off-shell N=1 superconformal higher spin multiplets in four spacetime dimensions and briefly discuss their coupling to conformal supergravity. As an example, we explicitly work out the coupling of the superconformal gravitino multiplet to conformal supergravity. The corresponding action is super-Weyl invariant for arbitrary supergravity backgrounds. However, it is gauge invariant only if the supersymmetric Bach tensor vanishes. This is similar to linearised conformal supergravity in curved background.