Topological field theories in n-dimensional spacetimes and Cartan's equations

Understand

Action principles of the BF type for diffeomorphism invariant topological field theories living in n-dimensional spacetime manifolds are presented.

• Their construction is inspired by Cuesta and Montesinos' recent paper where Cartan's first and second structure equations together with first and second Bianchi identities are treated as the equations of motion for a field theory.
• In opposition to that paper, the current approach involves also auxiliary fields and holds for arbitrary n-dimensional spacetimes.
• Dirac's canonical analysis for the actions is detailedly carried out in the generic case and it is shown that these action principles define topological field theories, as mentioned.