Yang-Mills as massive Chern-Simons theory: a third way to three-dimensional gauge theories

摘要

The Yang-Mills (YM) equation in three spacetime dimensions (3D) can bemodified to include a novel parity-preserving interaction term, with inversemass parameter, in addition to a possible topological mass term. The novelty isthat the modified YM equation is not the Euler-Lagrange equation of anygauge-invariant local action for the YM gauge potential alone. Instead,consistency is achieved in the "third way" exploited by 3D "minimal massivegravity". We relate our results to the "novel Higgs mechanism" for Chern-Simonsgauge theories.