Symmetries and the antibracket Original Research Article

Requiring that a lagrangian path integral leads to certain identities (Ward identities in a broad sense) can be formulated in a general BRST language, if necessary by the use of collective fields. The condition of BRST symmetry can then be expressed with the help of the antibracket, and suitable generalizations thereof. In particular, a new Grassmann-odd bracket, which reduces to the conventional antibracket in a special limit, naturally appears. We illustrate the formalism with various examples.