'Massless' vector field in de Sitter Universe

In the present work the massless vector field in the de Sitter (dS) space has been quantized. 'Massless' is used here by reference to conformal invariance and propagation on the dS light-cone whereas 'massive' refers to those dS fields which contract at zero curvature unambiguously to massive fields in Minkowski space. Due to the gauge invariance of the massless vector field, its covariant quantization requires an indecomposable representation of the de Sitter group and an indefinite metric quantization. We will work with a specific gauge fixing which leads to the simplest one among all possible related Gupta-Bleuler structures. The field operator will be defined with the help of coordinate independent de Sitter waves (the modes) which are simple to manipulate and most adapted to group theoretical matters. The physical states characterized by the divergence-lessness condition will for instance be easy to identify. The whole construction is based on analyticity requirements in the complexified pseudo-Riemannian manifold for the modes and the two-point function. (authors)