Generalized Maxwell equations and the gauge mixing mechanism of mass generation

The content of this paper consists of three main steps: (1) the construction of antisymmetric tensor field representations of massive particles, (2) the transition to the massless ''Maxwell theory'' endowed with a generalized abelian gauge invariance, (3) a mixing mechanism of the massless gauge fields in step (2) to generate the massive tensor field representations of step (1). The gauge mixing of the massless fields exhibits the phenomenon of ''spin jumping'' from the massless representation to the massive one. This spin discontinuity is strictly a consequence of the gauge invariance of the Maxwell theory and is discussed in connection with the established inequivalence of different field representations sharing the same number of degrees of freedom. A full understanding of this paper involves some properties of relativistic strings and bags. As a byproduct of this work we recover the results that the ''bag constant'' of hadrondynamics and the gravitational cosmological constant can be reformulated as the ''Maxwell theory'' of the antisymmetric tensor field A sub(μνrho). (author)