Matteo Broccoli (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics)

  • Date: 09 JULY 2021  from 14:30 to 15:30

The Third Way to Interacting p-forms Theories

In three spacetime dimensions certain gravitational and gauge theories are `third way’ consistent. This means that their equations of motion are only on-shell consistent and do not come from the variation of an action which contains the dynamical field alone. Although this mechanism is not special to 3d, no higher dimensional third way consistent theory was known. In this talk, I will introduce the third way by presenting the 3d theories and show how we recover them by shifting a flat gauge connection. Applying the same method in higher dimensions, we find a new class of interacting (d-2)-form theories and I will discuss various generalisations of them. Our result proves that the third way can be realised in dimensions higher than three, and I will conclude by discussing the possibility of constructing new third way consistent theories of gravity.