CANONICAL BRST QUANTIZATION OF WORLDSHEET GRAVITIES Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • We reformulate the BRST quantisation of chiral Virasoro and W3 worldsheet gravities. Our approach follows directly the classic BRST formulation of Yang-Mills theory in employing a derivative gauge condition instead of the conventional conformal gauge condition, supplemented by an introduction of momenta in order to put the ghost action back into first-order form. The consequence of these simple changes is a considerable simplification of the BRST formulation, the evaluation of anomalies and the expression of Wess-Zumino consistency conditions. In particular, the transformation rules of all fields now constitute a canonical transformation generated by the BRST operator Q, and we obtain in this reformulation a new result that the anomaly in the BRST Ward identity is obtained by application of the anomalous operator Q2, calculated using operator products, to the gauge fermion. 1995.

published proceedings

  • NUCLEAR PHYSICS B

author list (cited authors)

  • MOHAYEE, R., POPE, C. N., STELLE, K. S., & XU, K. W.

citation count

  • 5

complete list of authors

  • MOHAYEE, R||POPE, CN||STELLE, KS||XU, KW

publication date

  • January 1995