On the dimensional dependence of duality groups for massive p-forms

We study the soldering formalism in the context of Abelian p-form theories. We develop further the fusion process of massless antisymmetric tensors of different ranks into a massive p-form and establish its duality properties. To illustrate the formalism we consider two situations. First the soldering mass generation mechanism is compared with the Higgs and Julia–Toulouse mechanisms for mass generation due to condensation of electric and magnetic topological defects. We show that the soldering mechanism interpolates between them for even-dimensional spacetimes, in this way confirming the Higgs/Julia–Toulouse duality proposed by Quevedo and Trugenberger [Nucl. Phys. B 501 (1997) 143] a few years ago. Next, soldering is applied to the study of duality group classification of the massive forms. We show a dichotomy controlled by the parity of the operator defining the symplectic structure of the theory and find their explicit actions.