A basic problem of classical field theory, which has attracted growing attention over the past decade, is to find and classify all nonlinear deformations of linear abelian gauge theories. The physical interest in studying deformations is to address uniqueness of known nonlinear interactions of gauge fields and to look systematically for theoretical possibilities for new interactions. Mathematically, the study of deformations aims to understand the rigidity of the nonlinear structure of gauge field theories and to uncover new types of nonlinear geometrical structures. The first part of this paper summarizes and significantly elaborates a field-theoretic deformation method developed in earlier work. Some key contributions presented here are, firstly, that the determining equations for deformation terms are shown to have an elegant formulation using Lie derivatives in the jet space associated with the gauge field variables. Secondly, the obstructions (integrability conditions) that must be satisfied by lowest-order deformations terms for existence of a deformation to higher orders are explicitly identified. Most importantly, a universal geometrical structure common to a large class of nonlinear gauge theory examples is uncovered. This structure is derived geometrically from the deformed gauge symmetry and is characterized by a covariant derivative operator plus a nonlinear field strength, related through the curvature of the covariant derivative. The scope of these results encompasses Yang–Mills theory, Freedman–Townsend theory, and Einstein gravity theory, in addition to their many interesting types of novel generalizations that have been found in the past several years. The second part of the paper presents a new geometrical type of Yang–Mills generalization in three dimensions motivated from considering torsion in the context of nonlinear sigma models with Lie group targets (chiral theories). The generalization is derived by a deformation analysis of linear abelian Yang–Mills Chern–Simons gauge theory. Torsion is introduced geometrically through a duality with chiral models obtained from the chiral field form of self-dual (2+2) dimensional Yang–Mills theory under reduction to (2+1) dimensions. Field-theoretic and geometric features of the resulting nonlinear gauge theories with torsion are discussed.
6d/5d exceptional gauge theories from web diagrams
