Minimal Local Lagrangians for Higher-Spin Geometry

The Fronsdal Lagrangians for free totally symmetric rank-s tensors rest on suitable trace constraints for their gauge parameters and gauge fields. Only when these constraints are removed, however, the resulting equations reflect the expected free higher-spin geometry. We show that geometric equations, in both their local and non-local forms, can be simply recovered from local Lagrangians with only two additional fields, a rank-(s-3) compensator and a rank-(s-4) Lagrange multiplier. In a similar fashion, we show that geometric equations for unconstrained rank-n totally symmetric spinor-tensors can be simply recovered from local Lagrangians with only two additional spinor-tensors, a rank-(n-2) compensator and a rank-(n-3) Lagrange multiplier.