Massive Triadic Chern-Simons Spin-3 Theory

Abstract

We introduce the massive gauge invariant, second order pure spin-3 theory in three dimensions. It consists of the addition of the second order gauge invariant massless pure spin-3 action with the first order topological(generalized) Chern-Simons spin-3 term corrected with lower spin auxiliary actions which avoid lower spin ghosts propagation. This second order intermediate action completes the catalogue of massive spin-3 actions having topological structure. We also consider its spontaneous break down through the addition of the inertial spin-3 nontopological Fierz-Pauli mass term. It is shown that this non gauge invariant pure spin-3 system is the uniform generalization of linearized massive vector Chern-Simons gravity and propagates just two spin $3^{\pm}$ excitations having different masses.