Higher Spin Conformal Geometry in Three Dimensions and Prepotentials for Higher Spin Gauge Fields

Understand

We study systematically the conformal geometry of higher spin bosonic gauge fields in three spacetime dimensions.

• We recall the definition of the Cotton tensor for higher spins and establish a number of its properties that turn out to be key in solving in terms of prepotentials the constraint equations of the Hamiltonian (3 + 1) formulation of four-dimensional higher spin gauge fields.
• The prepotentials are shown to exhibit higher spin conformal symmetry.
• Just as for spins 1 and 2, they provide a remarkably simple, manifestly duality invariant formulation of the theory.