Deformations of global symmetries in the extended antifield formalism

Abstract

It is outlined how deformations of field theoretical rigid symmetries can be constructed and classified by cohomological means in the extended antifield formalism. Special attention is devoted to deformations referring only to a subset of the rigid symmetries of a given model and leading to a nontrivial extension of the graded Lie algebra associated with that subset. The method is illustrated for a D=4, N=2 supersymmetric model where the central extension of the supersymmetry algebra emerges via a deformation. Deformations of gauge fixed actions with a BRST symmetry are discussed too and illustrated by the Curci-Ferrari model.