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Phys. Rev. D 29, 269–284 (1984)

Structure of superspace in supersymmetry

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Susumu Okubo
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627

See Also: Erratum

Received 25 August 1983; published in the issue dated 15 January 1984

It is known that the scalar superspace in supersymmetry theory is the direct sum of chiral, antichiral, and isoscalar (or linear) fields, provided that the mass of the system is not zero. However, we show here that the situation changes drastically for the massless case. The whole superspace becomes reducible but not fully reducible. Moreover, it is indecomposable in a sense to be specified. The same reducible but indecomposable property is also shared by any chiral, antichiral, and isoscalar spaces. However, if we accept only unitary representations on positive-metric spaces, then only irreducible components of these spaces must be physically relevant. We demonstrate that these facts are intimately connected with the structure of the commutator algebra of the little Lie superalgebra as well as with a difference of Casimir invariants of the supersymmetry between the massive and massless cases.

© 1984 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.29.269
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.29.269
PACS:

See Also

Erratum: Susumu Okubo, Erratum: Structure of superspace in supersymmetry, Phys. Rev. D 29, 1865 (1984).