High Energy Theory Seminar

In this talk I study the one loop effective action for a class of higher spin fields by using a first-quantized description. The latter is obtained by considering spinning particles, characterized by an extended local supersymmetry on the worldline. Quantizing the model on a circle with (A)dS target space allows us to produce a useful representation of the one loop effective action. In particular, we extract the first few heat kernel coefficients for arbitrary even spacetime dimension D and for spin S with rectangular Young tableau. In the second part of the talk I will examine the dimensional reduction on a circle of the former model in flat space. It describes massive HS fields in odd dimensions in terms of Fierz-Pauli equations, while in the massless limit it produces a multiplet of massless fields, described by various Young tableaux, obeying Fronsdal-Labastida equations. The model can be consistently coupled to (A)dS spaces, although the constraint algebra becomes nonlinear.