On the dimensional dependence of duality groups for massive p-forms

We study the soldering formalism in the context of Abelian p-form theories. We develop further the fusion process of massless antisymmetric tensors of different ranks into a massive p-form and establish its duality properties. To illustrate the formalism we consider two situations. First the soldering mass generation mechanism is compared with the Higgs and Julia-Toulouse mechanisms for mass generation due to condensation of electric and magnetic topological defects. We show that the soldering mechanism interpolates between them for even-dimensional spacetimes, in this way confirming the Higgs/Julia-Toulouse duality proposed by Quevedo and Trugenberger [Nucl. Phys. B 501 (1997) 143] a few years ago. Next, soldering is applied to the study of duality group classification of the massive forms. We show a dichotomy controlled by the parity of the operator defining the symplectic structure of the theory and find their explicit actions.