Off-shell higher-spin fields in AdS4 and external currents

Abstract

Abstract We construct an unfolded system for off-shell fields of arbitrary integer spin in 4d anti-de Sitter space. To this end we couple an on-shell system, encoding Fronsdal equations, to external Fronsdal currents for which we find an unfolded formulation. We present a reduction of the Fronsdal current system which brings it to the unfolded Fierz-Pauli system describing massive fields of arbitrary integer spin. Reformulating off-shell higher-spin system as the set of Schwinger–Dyson equations we compute propagators of higher-spin fields in the de Donder gauge directly from the unfolded equations. We discover operators that significantly simplify this computation, allowing a straightforward extraction of wave equations from an unfolded system.