Non-locally regularized antibracket-antifield formalism and anomalies in chiral W3 gravity Original Research Article

The non-local regularization method, recently proposed by Evans et al., and Kleppe and Woodward, is extended to general gauge theories by reformulating it along the ideas of the antibracket-antifield formalism. From the interplay of both frameworks a fully regularized version of the field-antifield (FA) formalism arises, being able to deal with higher order loop corrections and to describe higher order loop contributions to the BRST anomaly. The quantum master equation, considered in the FA framework as the quantity parametrizing BRST anomalies, is argued to be incomplete at two and higher order loops and conjectured to reproduce only the one-loop corrections to the h̵p anomaly generated by the addition of O(h̵k), k < p, counterterms.