SPIN-RAISING OPERATORS AND SPIN-3 2 POTENTIALS IN QUANTUM COSMOLOGY/

Local boundary conditions involving field strengths and the normal to the boundary, originally studied in anti-de Sitter spacetime, have bee n recently considered in one-loop quantum cosmology. This paper derive s the conditions under which spin-raising operators preserve these loc al boundary conditions on a 3-sphere for fields of spin-0, 1/2, 1, 2/3 and 2. Moreover, the two-component spinor analysis of the four potent ials of the totally symmetric and independent field strengths for spin -3/2 is applied to the case of a 3-sphere boundary. It is shown that s uch boundary conditions can only be imposed in a flat Euclidean backgr ound, for which the gauge freedom in the choice of the potentials rema ins.