Massive higher spin from dimensional reduction of gauge fields

A unified treatment of symmetric and ''D-bein'' higher integer spin massive fields in arbitrary dimension is presented and illustrated with the generic cases of spins 3 and 4. The theories are uniformly generated from massless gauge systems in one higher dimension by Kaluza--Klein reduction. The origin and role of various auxiliary field formulations are thereby clarified in terms of the underlying gauge freedom. This treatment is compared with the construction of massive theories from gauge field actions in the same dimension. The general canonical formulation is also exhibited. copyright 1987 Academic Press, Inc