The Rarita--Schwinger field: dressing procedure and spin-parity content

Abstract

We obtain in analytical form the dressed propagator of the massive Rarita-Schwinger field taking into account all spin components. We found that the nearest analogy for dressing the Rarita--Schwinger field in spin--1/2 sector is dressing the two Dirac fermions of opposite parity with presence of mutual transitions. The calculation of the self-energy contributions confirms that besides the leading spin--3/2 component the Rarita--Schwinger field contains also two spin--1/2 components of different parity.

Comments: 16 pages, 5 figures; some typographical errors are corrected