Construction of arbitrary order conformally invariant operators in higher spin spaces (Q2411214)

The Dirac operator and twisted Dirac operators have been studied extensively during the last decades and were used in many other branches of mathematics and mathematical physics. Another operator, acting on \(C\)-valued fields, related to the Dirac operator acting on spinor-valued fields is the Laplace operator. The operator which generalizes the Dirac operator to higher-spin is the so-called Rarita-Schwinger operator whose equation is the spin analogue of Dirac equation in dimension 4. There is a generalization of the Rarita-Schwinger equations for spin 3/2 fields to the case of functions taking values in irreducible representation spaces with weight \(k+1/2\) when these fields may be realized as functions taking values in spaces of spherical monogenics and Clifford algebras. In [J. Funct. Anal. 185, No. 2, 425--455 (2001; Zbl 1078.30041)], \textit{J.~Bureš} et al. considered generalizations of classical Clifford analysis techniques to higher-spin spaces, focusing on operators acting on functions on \(\mathbb R^m\) that take values in arbitrary irreducible representations of \(\mathrm{Spin}(m)\). Generally, these are polynomial representations, such as spaces of \(k\)-homogeneous monogenic or harmonic polynomials \(\mathcal{M}_k\) or \(\mathcal{H}_k\) corresponding to particles of half-integer spin or integer spin. In this paper, the authors construct the generalization of the Laplace operator to the case of higher-spin \(\mathcal{D}_k:C^\infty(\mathbb R^m,\mathcal{H}_k)\to C^\infty(\mathbb R^m,\mathcal{H}_k)\), where the target space \(\mathcal{H}_k(\mathbb R^m,\mathbb C)\) is a degree-\(m\) homogeneous harmonic polynomial space. They use the representation theory on conformally invariant differential operators in higher-spin theory. This construction also reveals that Stein-Weiss gradient operators and representation theory of the Spin group provide the most natural approach to the study of Rarita-Schwinger operators. Also, they define a convolution-type operator associated to each fundamental solution to show each fundamental solution is actually the inverse of the corresponding differential operator. Finally, the authors introduce bosonic operators \(\mathcal{D}_{2j}\) as the generalization of \(\mathcal{D}^{2j}_x\) when acting on \(C^\infty(\mathbb R^m,\mathcal{H}_k)\) and fermionic operators \(\mathcal{D}_{2j-1}\) as the generalization of \(\mathcal{D}^{2j-1}_x\) when acting on \(C^\infty(\mathbb R^m,\mathcal{M}_k)\), where \(\mathcal{D}_x\) is the Euclidean Dirac operator with respect to the variable \(x\). The connections between these and lower-order conformally invariant operators are also provided in the construction.