Path integral bosonization of massive GNO fermions Original Research Article

We show the quantum equivalence between certain symmetric space sine-Gordon models and the massive free fermions. In the massless limit, these fermions reduce to the free fermions introduced by Goddard, Nahm and Olive (GNO) in association with symmetric spaces KG. A path integral formulation is given in terms of the Wess-Zumino-Witten action where the field variable g takes value in the orthogonal, unitary, and symplectic representations of the group G in the basis of the symmetric space. We show that, for example, such a path integral bosonization is possible when the symmetric spaces KG are SU(N) × SU(N)/SU(N); N ⩽ 3, Sp(2)/U(2) or SO(8)/U(4). We also address the relation between massive GNO fermions and the non-Abelian solitons, and explain the restriction imposed on the fermion mass matrix due to the integrability of the bosonic model.