Covariant Effective Action for Antisymmetric Tensor Field

Abstract

Covariant quantization of rank-2 antisymmetric fields is non-trivial due to additional symmetries of the gauge parameters. We present an intuitive way to deal with this additional symmetry of gauge parameters in terms of geometrical understanding of field space. We generalize the DeWitt-Vilkovisky covariant effective action formalism for quantization of such theories. As an application, we quantize a massive rank-2 antisymmetric field using the covariant effective action approach and reproduce previously obtained results.

Comments: 7 pages, 1 figure, prd format; text improved, typos corrected, references added, acknowledgement added; to appear in PRD