Massive and massless higher spinning particles in odd dimensions

Understand

We study actions for massive bosonic particles of higher spins by dimensionally reducing an action for massless particles.

• For the latter we take a model with a SO(N) extended local supersymmetry on the worldline, that is known to describe massless (conformal) particles of higher spins in flat spacetimes of even dimensions.
• Dimensional reduction produces an action for massive spinning particles in odd dimensions.
• The field equations that emerge in a quantization a la Dirac are shown to be equivalent to the Fierz-Pauli ones.