Nonlinear chiral forms in the Sen formulation

Abstract The Sen formulation for chiral (2 p )-form in $$4p+2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>4</mml:mn> <mml:mi>p</mml:mi> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> dimensions describes a system with two separate sectors, one is physical while the other is unphysical. Each contains a chiral form and a metric. In this paper, we focus on the cases where the self-duality condition for the unphysical sector is linear while for the physical sector can be nonlinear. We show the decoupling at the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian levels. The decoupling at the Hamiltonian level follows the idea in the literature. Then by an appropriate field redefinition of the corresponding first-order Lagrangian, the separation at the Lagrangian level follows. We derive the diffeomorphism of the theory in the case where the chiral form in the physical sector has nonlinear self-dual field strength and couples to external $$(2p+1)$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>(</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> <mml:mi>p</mml:mi> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> <mml:mo>)</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> -form field. Explicit forms of Sen theories are also discussed. The Lagrangian for the quadratic theory is separated into two Henneaux–Teitelboim Lagrangians. We also discuss the method of generating explicit nonlinear theories with $$p=1$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>p</mml:mi> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> . Finally, we also show that the M5-brane action in the Sen formulation is separated into a Henneaux–Teitelboim action in unphysical sector and a gauge-fixed PST in physical sector.