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Symmetries Beget Symmetries: Ghostly Higher-Form Symmetries and the Descent Equation
Leron Borsten, Dimitri Kanakaris, Hyungrok Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15978 https://

Symmetries Beget Symmetries: Ghostly Higher-Form Symmetries and the Descent Equation
Viewed through the lens of the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism, we demonstrate that higher-form currents with nonzero ghost number also define higher-form symmetries, directly analogous to the standard higher-form symmetries with ghost number zero. These ghostly higher symmetries descend from and into conventional higher-form symmetries via chains of descent equations familiar from the theory of anomalies and topological field theories. We give examples of such chains of ghostly symmetries in Maxw…