Existence of local degrees of freedom for higher dimensional pure Chern-Simons theories

The canonical structure of higher dimensional pure Chern-Simons theories is analyzed. It is shown that these theories have generically a nonvanishing number of local degrees of freedom, even though they are obtained by means of a topological construction. This number of local degrees of freedom is computed as a function of the spacetime dimension and the dimension of the gauge group. © 1996 The American Physical Society.