Meet biform singletons in your area! Topological actions for edge modes
Abstract
We present topological field theories propagating biform singleton fields as edge modes. In even spacetime dimensions D=2p, these are irreducible representations of the conformal algebra so(2,2p) with two-column Young diagrams of height p. Their duality properties depend on the parity of p: They propagate chiral degrees of freedom for odd p, and exhibit electric--magnetic duality for even p. We are able to construct the topological actions by realising the hidden conformal symmetry inherent to singletons geometrically in terms of an auxiliary bulk AdS2p+1 geometry. Using these as a starting point, we are able to apply a recently established covariant boundary reduction procedure to yield novel action formulations with manifest Lorentz covariance. We also show how, breaking manifest Lorentz covariance, we recover known formulations of biform singletons.
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BibTeX
@misc{chen2026meet,
title = {{Meet biform singletons in your area! Topological actions for edge modes}},
author = {Calvin Y. -R. Chen and Euihun Joung and Karapet Mkrtchyan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.03780},
eprint = {2611.03780},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03780},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Meet biform singletons in your area! Topological actions for edge modes
AU - Calvin Y. -R. Chen
AU - Euihun Joung
AU - Karapet Mkrtchyan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.03780
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03780
AB - We present topological field theories propagating biform singleton fields as edge modes. In even spacetime dimensions D=2p, these are irreducible representations of the conformal algebra so(2,2p) with two-column Young diagrams of height p. Their duality properties depend on the parity of p: They propagate chiral degrees of freedom for odd p, and exhibit electric--magnetic duality for even p. We are able to construct the topological actions by realising the hidden conformal symmetry inherent to singletons geometrically in terms of an auxiliary bulk AdS_2p+1 geometry. Using these as a starting point, we are able to apply a recently established covariant boundary reduction procedure to yield novel action formulations with manifest Lorentz covariance. We also show how, breaking manifest Lorentz covariance, we recover known formulations of biform singletons.
ER -