Remarks on Existence of Proper Action for Reducible Gauge Theories

Abstract

In the field-antifield formalism, we review existence and uniqueness proofs for the proper action in the reducible case. We give two new existence proofs based on two resolution degrees called "reduced antifield number" and "shifted antifield number", respectively. In particular, we show that for every choice of gauge generators and their higher stage counterparts, there exists a proper action that implements them at the quadratic order in the auxiliary variables.