Unified BRST description of AdS gauge fields

A concise formulation for mixed-symmetry gauge fields on AdS space is proposed. It is explicitly local, gauge invariant, and has manifest AdS symmetry. Various other known formulations (including the original formulation of Metsaev and the unfolded formulation) can be derived through the appropriate reductions and gauge fixing. As a byproduct, we also identify some new useful formulations of the theory that can be interesting for further developments. The formulation is presented in the BRST terms and extensively uses Howe duality. In particular, the BRST operator is a sum of the term associated to the spacetime isometry algebra and the term associated to the Howe dual symplectic algebra. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V.