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Gauging the Wess-Zumino term of a sigma model with boundary

José Figueroa-O'Farrill·Noureddine Mohammedi
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Abstract

We investigate the gauging of the Wess-Zumino term of a sigma model with boundary. We derive a set of obstructions to gauging and we interpret them as the conditions for the Wess-Zumino term to extend to a closed form in a suitable equivariant relative de Rham complex. We illustrate this with the two-dimensional sigma model and we show that the new obstructions due to the boundary can be interpreted in terms of Courant algebroids. We specialise to the case of the Wess-Zumino-Witten model, where it is proved that there always exist suitable boundary conditions which allow gauging any subgroup which can be gauged in the absence of a boundary. We illustrate this with two natural classes of gaugings: (twisted) diagonal subgroups with boundary conditions given by (twisted) conjugacy classes, and chiral isotropic subgroups with boundary conditions given by cosets.

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José Figueroa-O'Farrill, Noureddine Mohammedi. 2005-08-22. Gauging the Wess-Zumino term of a sigma model with boundary. https://doi.org/10.1088/1126-6708%2F2005%2F08%2F086

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