Twisters and actions on coset manifolds - art. no. 024030

Particle and string actions on coset spaces typically lack a quadratic kine tic term, making their quantization difficult. We define a nation of twiste rs on these spaces, which are hypersurfaces in a vector space that transfor m linearly under the isometry group of the coset. By associating the points of the coset space with these hypersurfaces, and the internal coordinates of these hypersurfaces with momenta, it is possible to construct manifestly symmetric actions with leading quadratic terms. We give a general algorith m and work out the case of a particle on AdS(p) explicity. In this case, th e resulting action is a world-line gauge theory with sources (the gauge rou p depending on p), which is equivalent to a nonlocal world-line sigma model .