Conformal Killing Tensors, Noether Currents and Higher-Spin Shift Symmetries in (A)dS Space

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hinterbichler, Kurt, Saha, Samanta, Yan, Thomas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Hinterbichler, Kurt
Saha, Samanta
Yan, Thomas
author_facet Hinterbichler, Kurt
Saha, Samanta
Yan, Thomas
contents For certain mass values, shift symmetries appear among massive higher spin fields propagating on (anti-) de Sitter spacetime. On the one hand, Noether's theorem assigns a set of conserved currents for each shift symmetric field, one current for each of the independent shift symmetries. On the other hand, each shift symmetric field comes with a higher-rank conserved field strength that can be contracted with a conformal Killing tensor (CKT) to form another set of conserved currents, one for each independent CKT. This second set is naively much larger than the first. We conjecture, and prove in the first few cases, that these two sets are the same once we account for the redundancy due to trivial currents that is implicit in Noether's theorem. For each field, only one branch of the CKTs is non-trivial. As we range over all the mass values and spins of the shift symmetric fields, each kind of CKT gets used exactly once in a non-trivial current.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_10188
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conformal Killing Tensors, Noether Currents and Higher-Spin Shift Symmetries in (A)dS Space
Hinterbichler, Kurt
Saha, Samanta
Yan, Thomas
High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
For certain mass values, shift symmetries appear among massive higher spin fields propagating on (anti-) de Sitter spacetime. On the one hand, Noether's theorem assigns a set of conserved currents for each shift symmetric field, one current for each of the independent shift symmetries. On the other hand, each shift symmetric field comes with a higher-rank conserved field strength that can be contracted with a conformal Killing tensor (CKT) to form another set of conserved currents, one for each independent CKT. This second set is naively much larger than the first. We conjecture, and prove in the first few cases, that these two sets are the same once we account for the redundancy due to trivial currents that is implicit in Noether's theorem. For each field, only one branch of the CKTs is non-trivial. As we range over all the mass values and spins of the shift symmetric fields, each kind of CKT gets used exactly once in a non-trivial current.
title Conformal Killing Tensors, Noether Currents and Higher-Spin Shift Symmetries in (A)dS Space
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10188