Difference between field-antifield and light-cone quantisation I have learnt field-antifield quantisation and know that it can be used for very general gauge theories - open and reducible. I have not got much into light-cone quantisation but I am unable to see the motivation of why we need light cone quantisation if field-antifield is so powerful.
Can you point out difference between light-cone and field-antifield quantisation and also which is more powerful?
 A: *

*If we are tasked with quantizing a classical gauge theory, we want to try the lightcone (LC) quantization first because it is so much  simpler. In this way we can separate out & count physical DOFs, and otherwise familiarize ourselves with the quantum theory at hand.


*However, LC quantization sacrifices manifest Lorentz symmetry, so ultimately we would want to use covariant BRST quantization.


*The most general Lagrangian BRST quantization is the Batalin-Vilkovisky (BV) field-antifield formalism, which in principle can be applied to the most general open and reducible gauge algebra. It has been successfully used in a long list of gauge theories, see also e.g. this & this Phys.SE posts.
However, the BV field-antifield formalism may break down for various reasons. E.g.

*

*The original paper (Ref. 1) is using the deWitt condensed notation $$\varphi^{\alpha}(x)~\longrightarrow~\varphi^i,$$
where spacetime-indices are suppressed, heuristically treating infinite-dimensional field configurations as they were finitely many variables. Mathematically, this may be ill-defined.


*The gauge theory could be anomalous.


*There could be infinitely many gauge-for-gauge reducibility levels.


*Rank conditions could jump.
References:

*

*I.A. Batalin & G.A. Vilkovisky, Gauge Algebra and Quantization, Phys. Lett. B 102 (1981) 27–31.


*M. Henneaux & C. Teitelboim, Quantization of Gauge Systems, 1994.


*M. Henneaux, Lectures on the antifield-BRST formalism for gauge theories, Nucl. Phys. B  Proc. Suppl. 18 (1990) 47.


*J. Gomis, J. Paris & S. Samuel, Antibracket, Antifields and Gauge-Theory Quantization, arXiv:hep-th/9412228.
