Off-shell color-kinematics duality from codifferentials

Abstract

We examine the color-kinematics duality within the BV formalism, highlighting its emergence as a feature of specific gauge-fixed actions. Our goal is to establish a general framework for studying the duality while investigating straightforward examples of off-shell color-kinematics duality. In this context, we revisit Chern-Simons theory as well as introduce new examples, including BF theory and 2D Yang-Mills theory, which are shown to exhibit the duality off-shell. We emphasize that the geometric structures responsible for flat-space color-kinematics duality appear for general curved spaces as well.