Higher-Spin Fermionic Gauge Fields and Their Electromagnetic Coupling

Understand

We study the electromagnetic coupling of massless higher-spin fermions in flat space.

• Under the assumptions of locality and Poincare invariance, we employ the BRST-BV cohomological methods to construct consistent parity-preserving off-shell cubic 1-s-s vertices.
• Consistency and non-triviality of the deformations not only rule out minimal coupling, but also restrict the possible number of derivatives.
• Our findings are in complete agreement with, but derived in a manner independent from, the light-cone-formulation results of Metsaev and the string-theory-inspired results of Sagnotti-Taronna.