ON THE COVARIANTIZATION OF THE CHIRAL CONSTRAINT

We show that a complete covariantization of the chiral constraint in the Floreanini-Jackiw necessitates an infinite number of auxiliary Wess-Zumino fields otherwise the covariantization is only partial and unable to remove the nonlocality in the chiral boson operator. We comment on recent works that claim to obtain covariantization through the use of Batalin-Fradkin-Tyutin method, that uses just one Wess-Zumino field.