No abstract

This paper is concerned with theories describing spinning particles that are formulated in terms of actions possessing either local world-line supersymmetry or local fermionic kappa invariance. These classical actions are obtained by adding a finite number of spinor or vector coordinates to the usual space-time coordinates.Generalizing to superspace leads to corresponding types of 'spinning superparticle' theories in which the wave-functions are superfields in some (generally reducible) representation of the Lorentz group. A class of these spinning superparticle actions possesses the same spectrum as ten-dimensional supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, which it is shown can be formulated in terms of either vector or spinor superfields satisfying supercovariant constraints. The models under consideration include some that were known previously and some new ones.

This paper is devoted to the quantization of the second-ilk superparticle using the Batalin-Vilkovisky method. We show the full structure of the master action.By imposing gauge conditions on the gauge fields rather than on coordinates we find a gauge-fixed quantum action which is free. The structure of the BRST charge is exhibited, and the BRST cohomology yields the same physical spectrum as the light-cone quantization of the usual superparticle. § Work supported by CONACYT-MEXICO.