The Doublet Extension of Tensor Gauge Potentials and a Reassessment of the Non-Abelian Topological Mass Mechanism

A well-defined local gauge structure for non-Abelian two-form gauge fields was introduced some years ago. This was achieved by introducing doublet group representations and doublet-assembled connections. We provide a summarized version of this formalism, in order to recall its features and applications. We also build up doublet-extended gauge-invariant actions for bosonic and fermionic matter, and discuss the appearance of novel topological quantities in these doublet-type gauge models. A partner action for higher spin fields appears in the doublet version of the fermionic matter sector. As an application of the formalism, a Chern-Simons and an Yang-Mills action in four dimensions may both be rigorously defined. We carry out this task and show that, in this doublet framework, their combination constitutes a consistent (power-counting renormalizable and unitary) non-Abelian generalization of the Cremmer-Scherk-Kalb-Ramond theory with topological mass.