1994/04/30 by R. Mohayaee, C. N. Pope, K. S. Stelle +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/0550-3213(94)00404-3
published as Nucl.Phys.B433:712-736,1995 · 27 pages. (Some factors of \hbar corrected)
arxiv created 1994/04/30 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
We reformulate the BRST quantisation of chiral Virasoro and W3 worldsheet gravities. Our approach follows directly the classic BRST formulation of Yang-Mills theory in employing a derivative gauge condition instead of the conventional conformal gauge condition, supplemented by an introduction of momenta in order to put the ghost action back into first-order form. The consequence of these simple changes is a considerable simplification of the BRST formulation, the evaluation of anomalies and the expression of Wess-Zumino consistency conditions. In particular, the transformation rules of all fields now constitute a canonical transformation generated by the BRST operator Q, and we obtain in this reformulation a new result that the anomaly in the BRST Ward identity is obtained by application of the anomalous operator Q2, calculated using operator products, to the gauge fermion.