Lectures on supergravity

This paper is a collection of lecture notes on the superfield approach in three- and four-dimensional supersymmetric quantum field theory. Many examples of the applications of this approach to different superfield models are considered.

This contribution gives a panoramic overview of the development of N=8 supergravity and its relation to other maximally supersymmetric theories over the past 40 years. It also provides a personal perspective on the future role of this theory in attempts at unification.

In physics literature about supersymmetry, many authors refer to \emph{super Minkowski spaces}. These spaces are affine supermanifolds with certain distinguished spin structures. In these notes, we make the notion of such spin structures precise and generalise the setup to curved supermanifolds. This leads to the more general notion of \emph{spinorial superspaces}. By working in a suitable geometric and coordinate-free setting, many explicit coordinate computations appearing ...

Withdrawn by arXiv administration because authors have forged affiliations and acknowledgements, and have not adequately responded to charges [hep-th/9912039] of unattributed use of verbatim material.

As the title indicates

We give a gentle introduction to the global geometric formulation of the bosonic sector of four-dimensional supergravity on an oriented four-manifold $M$ of arbitrary topology, providing a geometric characterization of its U-duality group. The geometric formulation of four-dimensional supergravity is based on a choice of a vertically Riemannian submersion $\pi$ over $M$ equipped with a flat Ehresmann connection, which determines the non-linear section sigma model of the theor...

We review some of the recent work on the dynamics of four dimensional, supersymmetric gauge theories. The kinematics are largely determined by holomorphy and the dynamics are governed by duality. The results shed light on the phases of gauge theories. Some results and interpretations which have not been published before are also included.

We formulate a theory for N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills multiplet in a non-adjoint representation R of SO(N) as an important application of our recently-proposed model for N=1 supersymmetry. This system is obtained by dimensional reduction from an N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills multiplet in non-adjoint representation in ten dimensions. The consistency with supersymmetry requires that the non-adjoint representation R with the indices i, j, ... satisfy the three conditions \eta^...

Some general features of locally supersymmetric theories (N=1 in four dimensions) involving Chern-Simons forms and antisymmetric tensors are sketched out. The relevance of the three-form multiplet both for the description of Chern-Simons forms and the supersymmetry properties of the gaugino condensate is pointed out.

In the $N=1$ superspace, AdS$_4$ supersymmetry is realized as the non-linear super coordinate transformations. The fermionic coordinates form a faithful non-linear representation of supersymmetry on their own. By introducing an auxiliary scalar coordinate, this representation is reformulated as a 5-dimensional linear representation, i.e., the superspinor representation. New linear representations are constructed by tensor products of multiple superspinors. Especially, the sup...